“The intelligence community must be transformed – a goal that would be difficult to meet even in the best of all possible worlds,” the commission said in its report to President Bush. “And we do not live in the best of worlds.”
The commission said the erroneous assumption by intelligence agencies that Saddam Hussein possessed deadly chemical and biological weapons had damaged American credibility before a world audience, and that the damage would take years to undo…
“The C.I.A. and N.S.A. may be sleek and omniscient in the movies, but in real life they and other intelligence agencies are vast government bureaucracies,” the nine-member commission told the president.
I don’t buy this “lumbering bureaucracy” excuse. It’s not that I think our intelligence agencies are well coordinated…they’re not.
When Bush Sr. decided to stop the Persian Gulf War, he expected that Saddam Hussein would be toppled in short order. When that did not happen our country got sucked into a containment policy as an ad hoc solution.
We imposed economic sanctions on Iraq, but, ironically, they only served to strengthen Saddam’s hold on power. The sanctions crimped trade in the region, hurting the struggling regional economies. When we developed the oil-for-food program as an attempt to alleviate humanitarian concerns in Iraq, it only invited corruption and skimming by the Ba’athists in power.
Our heavy military presence in Saudi Arabia, necessitated by our need to patrol the southern no-fly zones, had invited repeated attacks on American interests in the Kingdom, as well as in Africa and Yemen, and finally New York, and Washington DC.
As early as February 1998, the Republicans had pushed through the Iraq Liberation Act. The Act stated that American policy should “support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq,” and it authorized $97 million in military aid and equipment for dissident parties within Iraq.
By December 1998, President Clinton had adopted ‘regime change’ as official policy toward Iraq. In early 1999, he sent Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to the region to feel out support for Saddam’s overthrow.
Now, this is just my opinion, but if you make it the official policy of this country to overthrow another government, and then you don’t do anything about it, you are asking for trouble. The prudent thing to do, is to not make such bellicose proclamations until you are prepared to act on them.
The Iraqi Liberation Act was pushed by hawks in both parties, but predominately by Republicans, as a way to force Clinton’s hand. Clinton paid lip-service to regime-change in Iraq, but he didn’t take decisive action.
At least, that was the mindset of the neo-conservatives that came to power in 2001. They wanted to take Saddam out from the moment they were sworn into office, and all they needed was an excuse.
We have heard reports of how, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Paul Wolfowitz recommended invading Iraq instead of Afghanistan. We have heard Richard Clarke relate how Bush demanded he find an al-Qaeda connection to Saddam Hussein.
But what really forced the hand of American foreign policy was the Axis-of-Evil speech, which was a virtual declaration of war on Iraq. At that point, it was no longer the job of our intelligence agencies to do dispassionate analysis and risk assessment. It was their job to prepare us for war. And that is what they attempted to do. It’s absurd to say that are they solely responsible for providing bad intelligence. They made the most compelling case for war that they could, based on the available evidence, because war was already set as the policy, and ginning up public support was deemed a critical prerequisite for success.
This latest Commission Report, is just another exercise in blame-shifting.
The Harman Commission, 9/11 Commission, and the Senate Intelligence Committee universally condemned the intelligence community as a “lumbering bureaucracy”. Recommendations to “overhaul”, “rework”, “rebuild”, and the ubiquitous “reinvent” are writ large in headlines. Balderdash.
It is patently absurd to attempt such a reorganization. Witness the organizationally-challenged and simply out-of-control department of homeland insecurity. Can’t these people do ANYTHING right? Hay-suse cris-tay. I’m not saying they’re dumb, but if you threw their collective brain up a pissant’s ass, it’d be like throwing a bb in a boxcar.
I, ME, lowly human, sitting here in California, can carry on a coversation, analyze data, search databases, coordinate with others in my “community of interest” in a secure manner from this chair. It’s a distributed knowledge world dipshits.
Eliminate the obese middle management structure; coordinate through the use of distributed databases; run the system on a discrete VPN; and instead of screwing up the lives of your personnel, just rename the damn position instead of “redeploying” them all over the place.
AND BECOME CLUEFUL: Do not under any circumstances believe that:
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I think one major reason we have such a hard time coordinating our intelligence agencies is that too many people are involved in illegal activities, or activities of dubious legality, and they don’t want anyone peeking into their files, or understanding who their agents are.
We had a tremendous amount of this blockage in the Reagan-Bush era, where the DEA was routinely given a stiff-arm by the CIA or NSC when they attempted to shut down narcotics or cocaine trafficking.
The same people are in power to today, just at a higher level.
I’m old enough to remember COINTELPRO & Operation Intercept. And Allende, Diem, the Shah, and the real Air America. [RIP Gary Webb].
The network is the computer. Brewster Kahle.
This administration fires that off as an excuse and as a problem that needs to be resolved. It is easy to blame the CIA because there is not much anybody can really do. By blaming them, the opportunity to create a new bureaucratic agency arises. Enter Negroponte.
The FBI and local police forces can’t communicate? Enter DHS. Nevermind that the “walls” getting in everyone’s way were a response to abuses of power in the ’70s.
Social programs are a bureaucracy that can be fixed with charity. Meanwhile, taxpayer funded R&D for tech and weapons industries is okay because it is defense.
For some reason, educating our children is not a defense against crime, unemployment, community discourse. It is another bureaucracy that can be fixed on the State and local level.
Now, big gov’t needs to be fixed in many ways, but giving it all to the whim and market of the private sector is worse than anything the gov’t could do. Blaming bureaucracy is part of the privatization mantra. But really, it is an excuse to abolish disliked programs, placing blame instead of addressing it, and creating new, larger agencies to consolidate power.
One thing that has always made me question is how little the administration seems to have paid attention to the “global terrorist threat” before 9-11, and afterwards we are immersed in this endless Global War on Terror. It was like they took that day and said it meant this forever war. That is suspicious. From not knowing anything like this could happen to having enough intellegence to know that we now have this great, ambigous enemy doesn’t make sense.
What different agencies and factions in the US think of its foreign policy.
It will be the people of the rest of the world, the survivors of that policy’s victims, who will decide how the US shall be “contained,” It is they who will answer “The American Question.”
For their part, Americans long ago weighed the consequences, and made their decision that whatever the price, it was worth it.
Until the shadowy Office of Special Plans (OSP) is also investigated (ya know, to be looked at in the infamous phase II of the investigation which before the elections were the priority for after the elections and after elections is no priority at all) I’ll consider any report on the so-called intelligence bogus.