No one seems to be writing opinion pieces quite the way I would, so I decided to do it myself.

The name? Taverns are places where one goes to discuss the interesting events and things in the world, so this is my tavern.

I will offer my views on politics, economics, and whatever else strikes my fancy.
I will occasionally publish the entire article from another journal for purposes of causing discussion.

 

Why was US Intelligence on Iraq so bad?

Seymour Hersh has a new article on US Intelligence that explains a lot. It is an excellent article. Here are some excerpts:

" Some of the old-timers in the community are appalled by how bad the analysis was,?” the official said. ?“If you look at them side by side, C.I.A. versus United Nations, the U.N. agencies come out ahead across the board."

The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic?—and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book ?“The Threatening Storm?” generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was ?“dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.

There was also a change in procedure at the Pentagon under Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary for Policy. In the early summer of 2001, a career official assigned to a Pentagon planning office undertook a routine evaluation of the assumption, adopted by Wolfowitz and Feith, that the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi, could play a major role in a coup d?’?©tat to oust Saddam Hussein. They also assumed that Chalabi, after the coup, would be welcomed by Iraqis as a hero.

An official familiar with the evaluation described how it subjected that scenario to the principle of what planners call ?“branches and sequels?”?—that is, ?“plan for what you expect not to happen.?” The official said, ?“It was a ?‘what could go wrong?’ study. What if it turns out that Ahmad Chalabi is not so popular? What?’s Plan B if you discover that Chalabi and his boys don?’t have it in them to accomplish the overthrow??”

The people in the policy offices didn?’t seem to care. When the official asked about the analysis, he was told by a colleague that the new Pentagon leadership wanted to focus not on what could go wrong but on what would go right. He was told that the study?’s exploration of options amounted to planning for failure. ?“Their methodology was analogous to tossing a coin five times and assuming that it would always come up heads,?” the official told me. ?“You need to think about what would happen if it comes up tails.?”
excellentticle provides an excellant review of the intelligence problems, including the Plame Affair.

In essence, the people in the Bush administration came into office knowing Saddamhey needed to remove Sadaam from Iraq, so they searched for the information that made the case for what they wanted to do. When the intelliginformationes filtered the infornation to what was reliable, it did not make that case, so they began requiring the raw intellunfortunatelymselves.

Unfortunaltely, the raw intelligence was data that was not reliable. Then, note the story above about the study for what might go wrong if Chalabi went into Iraq and wasnTheaccepted by the Iraqis. the Bush people considered this planning to fail, rather than planning what to do it the main plan didn't work. The result was that when ChalaBatistat accepted and the Baathist government was eliminated, there was nothing left and nothing in the pipeline to substitute for the failed plans.

The brief answer to the question "Why was US Intelligence on Iraq so bad?" is that the Bush people didn't like the answers they were getting, assumed that the Intelligence Agencies had to be getting it wrong, so they eliminated the effective analysis process and stove-piped the data that supported the actions they wanted to take to the political decision-makers.
posted by Richard at 8:54 PM