To a great deal of fanfare and with
surprising bipartisan unanimity in its conclusions, the
US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on July 9
published its 521-page "Report on the US Intelligence
Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq". By
and large, it's a bad report, at undue length it
rehashes well-known facts and reveals nothing new, and -
most unhappily - draws uninspired conclusions of little
forward-looking value.
The 9-11 Commission's
report, made public this Thursday after being in the
works for 20 months, had 46 more pages than the
Senate's, but proves no more illuminating. The
bipartisan panel (five Republicans, five Democrats) has
revived the tired old proposal of creating the position
of a cabinet-level official to oversee the nation's 15
or so intelligence agencies. To what effect or avail is
anyone's guess. The report's one memorable phrase is
that, "across the government, there were failures of
imagination ..." Now, imagine that!
Meanwhile,
Democratic presidential candidate Senator John Kerry has
also gotten into the act. Apparently taking his cue from
the 9-11 panel, he advocates the creation of a director
to oversee all facets of US intelligence, wants to
double spending for foreign clandestine operations, and
calls for accelerating Federal Bureau of Investigation
changes in handling of domestic intelligence.
While the Senate report for the most part is
more boring than informative, it does contain some
snippets worth noting, mainly Conclusion 6 (last
sentence): "Most, if not all, of these problems [with
prewar intelligence on Iraq] stem from a broken
corporate culture and poor management, and will not
be solved by additional funding and personnel" (my
emphasis).
Senator Kerry may want to take note -
as should the innumerable "former Central Intelligence
Agency operative" talking heads on US television
programs bewailing the (alleged) gross inadequacy in
numbers of US human-intelligence resources (case
officers, agents). The Senate report - rightly - points
out that, "if an [intelligence] officer willing and able
to take such an assignment [undercover activity in
prewar Iraq] really is 'rare' at the CIA [as the Senate
committee was told], the problem is less a question of
resources than a need for dramatic changes in a risk
averse corporate culture".
Well, indeed. And
risk aversion is hardly the only point at issue. Risk
aversion, whether in economic behavior (investing) or
the intelligence trade, is a sign of intellectual
calcification and of lack of creativity, self-confidence
and moral conviction, and can't be fixed by throwing
money or warm bodies at it. Much as in business, it's
unconventional initiative informed by superior knowledge
and insight, a contrarian attitude, and the ability to
spring surprises and act decisively that succeed in
intelligence.
Former CIA director George Tenet,
an ex-Senate intelligence committee staffer, instituted
modern management techniques at the agency and hired
additional operations officers empowered to run larger
numbers of agents - and that, of course, wasn't
necessarily all bad. The trouble is, it wasn't the right
medicine to cure the core problem Tenet inherited from
his predecessors.
Intelligence collection is no
tidy business; it's an element of warfare. Analysis of
raw intelligence data from a multiplicity of sources is
not a timeless academic exercise in accordance with
established scientific principles. It must reach
actionable conclusions in timely fashion. Most
important, intelligence undertakings must proceed from a
well-defined strategic perspective and war plan and be
executed with the attitude of Entschlossenheit
(considered abandon) Carl von Clausewitz puts forth as
the indispensable quality of the successful warrior.
Prior to September 11, 2001, US presidents Bill
Clinton and George W Bush had no strategy, no war plan
against terrorists, no clear or distinct idea even of
whom or what they were up against. It was a muddle, and
no one in the US intelligence community knew either, or
bothered to tell them if - per unlikely chance - they
knew. That by itself is a signal failure of analysis and
imagination - on a lesser scale played out on George
Tenet's watch prior to May 1998 when, clear evidence to
the contrary, no one in a position of authority at the
CIA was prepared to believe that India would carry out a
nuclear test.
Post-September 11, a strategy to
cope with Islamist terrorists was developed, but
it suffered from debilitating bifurcation in conception,
communication, and execution. That the United States
would go into Afghanistan, uproot al-Qaeda and the
Taliban regime it had captured, and deprive Osama bin
Laden of his safe-haven base was widely agreed and -
with some hiccups - competently executed. But the wider
strategic plan, to make war on Iraq and ultimately
uproot the entire Islamist menace through a policy of
"democratization" of the Middle East, though the certain
undertaking of key policymakers in the Bush
administration, was neither overtly put forth as policy
nor communicated to most of those expected to carry it
out. Instead, the excuse of alleged Iraqi weapons of
mass destruction (WMD) was cooked up as casus
belli for eliminating the regime of Saddam Hussein.
Probably Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz
et al did believe that Iraq was in possession of
and pursued WMD programs. Probably, for that reason,
they believed they could get away with strategic
deception. But, alas, it was not to be. In any case,
given the Bush administration insiders' true - and not
necessarily wrong - intentions, they would have been
(and might now be) a whole lot better off if they had
owned up to their actual strategy in the first place.
And not just that: US intelligence and the US military
would have had a clear notion of what they were doing
and supposed to be doing rather than tapping in the
dark.
The Senate committee's and 9-11 panel's
costly and extended exercises, therefore, were
ultimately useless. Yes, there were gross intelligence
failures prior to September 11 and there were
intelligence failures pre-Iraq. The pre-September 11
failures were failures of imagination and - in my Asia
Times Online colleague Spengler's parlance - failures of
culture. But the alleged pre-Iraq failures were simply
strategic deception calculations gone awry.
Compare this mess to the policies and policy
execution of the Reagan administration as it pursued
destruction of the "evil empire" in the 1980s. Compare
it to the intelligence role played by wily old Bill
Casey, Ronald Reagan's CIA director. Reagan told anyone
who wanted to listen, Mikhail Gorbachev included, that
his purpose was to end the Soviet empire. He devised the
Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI or "Star Wars") to
force the Soviet Union into an arms race it couldn't win
and which would ruin it economically. Casey, an
accomplished (and hence nasty) Wall Street lawyer,
employed most any dirty trick in the books to help
Reagan accomplish his aim. Much of it went haywire. Some
of it worked. The more chaos the better was Casey's
approach - and that of his intelligence officers. But by
1990, the Soviet Union was no more. The SDI even now is
far from realization.
But the difference between
now and then is only too obvious. Reagan had a plan and
executed it. Casey had all his ducks lined up to give it
maximum support. There were lies and deceptions in the
detail. Iran-contra was a mess. But there were no lies
and deceptions in the strategic goal. With Bush and
Tenet it's been the opposite: There were lies and
deceptions in the strategic goal - and the orderly
processes in the details of execution are now up for
scrutiny and ridicule because the strategy to date has
proved a failure. Tenet was a good manager, Casey a good
intelligence chief. (Copyright 2004 Asia Times
Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
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