Did Bush Lie or Was Prewar Intelligence Flawed?

In order to make the case that the Bush administration lied to the public in order to justify the war against Saddam, one has to prove that it knew the truth. Being mistaken is not the same thing as lying.

For some time this blog has been making a different case. Prewar intelligence was seriously flawed. While the flaws may have been well intentioned, they were deliberate. US Army Col. (ret) Patrick Lang makes this case in America Magazine for August 4, 2003.

In the world of foreign policy formulation there are two main groups of players. On the one hand are the intelligence analysts and their managerial supervisors, who are usually career professionals who have spent many years acquiring the skills and ethos of their craft. Their function in the process of foreign policy formulation is to describe reality as best they can. On the other hand are the policy formulation team of ministerial staff and politically selected seniors, who are responsible for proposing useful policy options and making decisions. Their purpose is to shape reality. Between these two groups there is constant tension, which is probably inevitable.

From time to time new people in a new administration try out the intelligence analysts to see how firmly they resist producing intelligence tailored to advance the agenda of the administration. In nearly all cases, a firm display of friendly distance is all that is required to set an appropriate tone for relations....

In the Bush administration, this carefully constructed system of checks and balances appears to have been distorted. It is now well known that some appointees in the Defense Department, the Vice President’s Office, the National Security Council and even the State Department entered office with a rigid and very ambitious set of geo-strategic goals for the future of the United States and indeed the world. As a result, the measured judgments of the intelligence community concerning such issues as the continuing presence of weapons of mass destruction and the degree of connection between Al Qaeda and the former government of Iraq were considered unsatisfactory by these people and insufficiently committed to the task of uncovering the “truth” of Iraqi culpability.

Unhappiness with what the intelligence community was producing grew to be so great after the first year of the Bush administration that the Defense Department created a small “cell” of civilians within the office of the secretary of defense dedicated to the task of critiquing the work of the intelligence community and re-examining the raw data from the vast stream of information available to the government. Its job was to find “tidbits” of information that had been overlooked by the professional analysts and that made the case for military action against Iraq. Not surprisingly, this group was able to apply the yardstick of its previous convictions to the available raw information (which included the self-interested statements of Iraqi émigrés) to find a pattern of information that could be packaged for the management of opinion at home and abroad.

Did they lie? No, the men involved would surely not lie. They can point to individual bits of information that were the basis of their arguments. It was certainly dishonest, however, to depict the strategic information warfare campaign that they were conducting as equivalent to the responsible work of American intelligence.

America Magazine is available on the web to subscriber's only. If you would like a copy of this article, let me know. As a subscriber, I can email it to you through www.americamagazine.org.

I don't believe that President Bush lied about the presence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. I do believe that the intelligence was seriously flawed. To some extent, this flaw was preventable. If top level officials in the Office of Secretary of Defense and the Central Intelligence agency been open to reports about WMD and Al Qeida, they might not have fought the war - or might have fought it differently.  See yesterday's post for some of the reasons for this.

There was a just war case to be made for the war, based on Saddam's atrocities committed against his own people and the need for democracy in the middle East. No one knows how well this would have been accepted.

Just War advocates should be seriously concerned with the issue of prewar intelligence and intelligence reform. There can be no just war unless there is a just cause and the decision to go to war is made by legitimate authorities. Neither of these can exist without objective and honest intelligence.