As a follow-up to BooMan’s “Rant on Nigergate,” read all of Pat Lang’s “Niger Mischief” — just posted at No Quarter (and BrendaStewart has also diaried this). This snippet should pique your interest:
Any casual observer of the present scene in that poor country must see that two years after the intervention Iraq has become a major theater of the War on Terror. Was it before the invasion? I think not and my conclusion is based on an understanding of the methods that Arab governments traditionally use in dealing with armed foreign political actors, namely that they try to placate those they can and try to destroy those they can’t. …
This leads to a need to “review the bidding” on what happened along the road to war. To that end, and from a certain self-serving desire to be read, I comment to the reader my article “Drinking the Koolaid,” published in Middle East Policy a couple of years ago. … CONT. BELOW:
A major TV news magazine hired me last year to help them look for those who knew the truth in this matter [the Niger documents]. They succeeded. A national wire service did the same thing without my help and has the result. The same is true of two other national news publications.
It is very clear now that this ducument was forged by a couple of the shadowy ex-government characters who dwell in the environs of Washington and was planted in Italy on the basis of the personal contacts of one of them with the intention of influencing the debate over Iraq in this country. How do I know that? Well, I just do in the way that intelligence officers learn things. Good sources, multiple sources, first person accounts, probabilities, that is how one learns things. Could I swear to it in court? No. Intelligence conclusions are not things that can be sworn to in court.
Nevertheless, one must ask why the newsmedia are sitting on this story. The answer seems simple. “Carrots and Sticks, carrots and sticks.” Work it out.
Lang didn’t link his “Drinking the Koolaid” article, so I looked it up: “Drinking the Koolaid,” published in Summer 2004. From that article:
What does drinking the Kool-Aid mean today? It signifies that the person in question has given up personal integrity and has succumbed to the prevailing group-think that typifies policymaking today. This person has become “part of the problem, not part of the solution.”
What was the “problem”? The sincerely held beliefs of a small group of people who think they are the “bearers” of a uniquely correct view of the world, sought to dominate the foreign policy of the United States in the Bush 43 administration, and succeeded in doing so through a practice of excluding all who disagreed with them. Those they could not drive from government they bullied and undermined until they, too, had drunk from the vat.
What was the result? The war in Iraq. It is not anything like over yet, and the body count is still mounting. As of March 2004, there were 554 American soldiers dead, several thousand wounded, and more than 15,000 Iraqis dead (the Pentagon is not publicizing the number). The recent PBS special on Frontline concerning Iraq mentioned that senior military officers had said of General Franks, “He had drunk the Kool-Aid.” Many intelligence officers have told the author that they too drank the Kool-Aid and as a result consider themselves to be among the “walking dead,” waiting only for retirement and praying for an early release that will allow them to go away and try to forget their dishonor and the damage they have done to the intelligence services and therefore to the republic.
What we have now is a highly corrupted system of intelligence and policymaking, one twisted to serve specific group goals, ends and beliefs held to the point of religious faith. Is this different from the situation in previous administrations? Yes. The intelligence community (the information collection and analysis functions, not “James Bond” covert action, which should properly be in other parts of the government) is assigned the task of describing reality. The policy staffs and politicals in the government have the task of creating a new reality, more to their taste. Nevertheless, it is “understood” by the government professionals, as opposed to the zealots, that a certain restraint must be observed by the policy crowd in dealing with the intelligence people. Without objective facts, decisions are based on subjective drivel. Wars result from such drivel. We are in the midst of one at present.
The signs of impending disaster were clear from the beginning of this administration. Insiders knew it all along. Statements made by the Bush administration often seem to convey the message that Iraq only became a focus of attention after the terrorist attacks on 9/11. The evidence points in another direction.
[…..]
Instead of including such veterans in the planning process, the Bush team opted for amateurs brought in from outside the Executive Branch who tended to share the views of many of President Bush’s earliest foreign-policy advisors and mentors. Because of this hiring bias, the American people got a Middle East planning process dominated by “insider” discourse among longtime colleagues and old friends …
… There seemed to be a general feeling among the newcomers that professional intelligence people somehow just did not “get it.” To add to the discomfort, the new Bush team began to do some odd things.
INFORMATION COLLECTION
Early in the Bush 43 administration, actions began that clearly reflected a predisposition to place regime change in Iraq at the top of the foreign-policy agenda. Sometime in January 2001, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), the opposition group headed by Ahmed Chalabi, began receiving U.S. State Department funds for an effort called the “Information-Collection Program.” Under the Clinton administration, some money had been given to Iraqi exiles for what might be called agit-prop activities against Saddam’s government, but the INC (Chalabi) had not been taken very seriously. They had a bad reputation for spending money freely with very little to show for it. The CIA had concluded that Chalabi and his INC colleagues were not to be trusted with taxpayers’ money. Nevertheless, Chalabi had longstanding ties to a group of well-established anti-Saddam American activists who were installed by the Bush administration as leading figures of the politically appointed civilian bureaucracy in the Pentagon and in the Office of the Vice President.
Those ties paid off. The Information-Collection Program, launched in the early months of the Bush administration, was aimed at providing funds to the INC for recruiting defectors from Saddam’s military and secret police, and making them available to American intelligence. …
[The article goes on for some length. Students of this war are familiar with this article. It is worth reading again today in its entirety.]
From his bio: Col. W. Patrick Lang is a retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces. He was the first Professor of the Arabic Language at West Point. In the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) he was the “Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East, South Asia and Terrorism.” He is an analyst consultant for many television and radio broadcasts, among them the Jim Lehrer “Newshour.”
Emphases mine.
