Don't Rebuke The "Spooks"

(Not for Iraq anyway; Intel parlance for spies, I hasten to add…)

This is the first chance I’ve had to note this, but last Sunday in the New York Times, writer Tim Weiner took the C.I.A. to task even though it released the information that Iran had abandoned its nuclear program four years ago (noted earlier today and elsewhere)…

Why would the United States start a war to stop a weapons-of-mass-destruction program that had been placed on hold? Been there, done that. American spies and analysts conjured up phantom Iraqi weapons programs in 2002; the nation went to war largely on the basis of that bad intelligence. And yet, according to the new analysis, American intelligence seems to have erred in much the same way in 2005, assuming Iran’s nuclear bomb was still in the works when it was not.

But last week’s about-face showed that the analysts are unlikely to make the same mistake thrice. Why? Because American intelligence is now asking itself: How do we know what we know?

The nation paid a terrible price for failing to do that about Iraq five years ago. The C.I.A.’s spies protected their purported sources on Saddam Hussein’s presumed weaponry — protected them so well that they shielded crucial data from the C.I.A.’s own analysts, who then failed to ask the right questions.

Weiner also tells us the following…

Gen. Mike Hayden, the C.I.A.’s chief, has said that the long war in which the nation is engaged is an intelligence war — one that will be won or lost with information and ideas, not smart bombs.

True, but wars also are won or lost based on “trying to win hearts and minds” of the population in the field of battle. And how did we have a snowball’s chance of achieving success with a Muslim population when someone like Karen Hughes, who doesn’t even speak Arabic, is given the task of trying to justify the Iraq war to a population that didn’t even consider Saddam Hussein a threat to begin with (noted here)? And how is that the C.I.A.'s fault?

As I read this critique by Weiner, it became apparent that his intent was only to blame the intelligence services for the epochal blunder of the Iraq war, even though in his book about the C.I.A. titled “Legacy Of Ashes,” he spread ample blame onto Dubya, as Times reviewer Michael Beschloss notes here…

Mr. Weiner is scathing about the current state of the agency, writing that George W. Bush has turned the institution “once proudly run by his father” into “a paramilitary police force abroad and a paralyzed bureaucracy at headquarters.” He says that President Bush “casually pronounced a political death sentence” on the C.I.A. in 2004 by dismissively explaining that the agency had been “just guessing” about the future of the Iraq war.

I know Weiner is highly knowledgeable on this subject so I’ll be respectful in my criticism, but the information from this link should be noted, in particular…

An "alternative intelligence" unit operating at the Pentagon in the run-up to the war on Iraq was dedicated to establishing a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, even though the CIA was unconvinced of such a connection, the US Senate was told yesterday.

…

(Pentagon Inspector General Thomas) Gimble described a unit called the Office for Special Plans, authorised by then Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and overseen by the former policy chief Douglas Feith, to review raw intelligence on Iraq. The main focus of the unit was establishing a link between Saddam and al-Qaida - going against the consensus in the intelligence community that the Iraqi leader had nothing to do with the September 11 2001 terror attacks.

And MoDo of The Times returned to form with this column today properly taking Feith and his boss Rummy to task over the war (resurrecting the quote from Gen. Tommy Franks that Feith is “the dumbest [expletive] guy on the planet” (Franks is hardly perfect himself, but he was dead-on here).

Bushco wanted war with Iraq from the moment it seized control of our executive branch in January 2001. Nothing was going to stop them. And for all of the CIA’s failures, it can’t be held accountable for that.