A Willful Intelligence Failure?

Since February 2004 , I’ve been developing this story line: There were mid-level intelligence professionals who recognized that the case for WMD in Iraq was flimsy. They expressed doubts. Their warnings reached the Senior Executive Service / General Officer level. These warnings were over-ruled by political appointees. No one knows if the President was aware that intelligence professionals were skeptical about the case.
    Today’s Washington Post has three stories that fit into this picture.

In a preview of PBS’s Frontline documentary “The Dark Side” Paul Farhi writes:

"The Dark Side" is an extensively reported, if visually dull, summation of the infighting, bureaucratic kneecapping and preconceived notions that led the United States to its invasion of Iraq. Its portrait of the triumph (or perhaps "triumph") of Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld over the administration's internal war skeptics could have been subtitled "How Dick and Don Rolled the CIA and State Department and Got Us Into This Mess."

The show will be telecast at 9 PM this evening.

In a review of Ron Suskind’s new book The One Percent Doctrine Barton Gellman writes:

"The One Percent Doctrine" takes its title from an episode in late November 2001. Amid fears of a "second wave" attack after 9/11, Tenet laid out for Vice President Cheney and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice a stunning trove of new intelligence, much of which Suskind reveals for the first time: Two Pakistani scientists who previously offered to help Libya build a nuclear bomb were known to have met with Osama bin Laden. (Later, Suskind reports, the U.S. government would discover that bin Laden asked pointedly what his next steps should be if he already possessed enriched uranium.) Cheney, by Suskind's account, had been grappling with how to think about "a low-probability, high-impact event." By the time the briefing was over, he had his answer: "If there's a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response."

(I share James Joyner's skepticism about the book’s claim that al-Qaeda planned a cyanide gas attack on the New York subway.) Based on the review, the rest of the book seems sound.

Lastly, Thomas Ricks reports on Cheney’s remark that the Iraqi insurgency is in its “last throes”:

Despite Cheney's assertion that no one foresaw how difficult the post-invasion phase would be, defense and Middle East experts have said that administration officials during the run-up to the war ignored their warnings about potential obstacles ahead.

For example, a group of specialists who met at the Army War College in December 2002, three months before the U.S. invaded Iraq, warned: "The possibility of the United States winning the war and losing the peace is real and serious." Iraq had been strained by decades of misrule, wars and sanctions, they observed, noting that "if the United States assumes control of Iraq, it will therefore assume control of a badly battered economy." The writers of the Army report emphasized that Iraq was going to be tougher than the administration was acknowledging publicly. "Successful occupation will not occur unless the special circumstances of this unusual country" are heeded, they warned.

Likewise, 70 national security experts and Middle East scholars met about the same time for two days at the National Defense University and then issued a report concluding that occupying Iraq "will be the most daunting and complex task the U.S. and the international community will have undertaken since the end of World War II." One participant, Army Col. Paul Hughes, sent a copy of the conference report to the office of Douglas J. Feith, then the undersecretary of defense for policy, but "never heard back from him or anyone else" over there, he said.

In this case, Cheney may be right. When they killed Zarqawi, U.S forces got his address book and rolled up much of the insurgent command structure.

This is an old story. After every intelligence failure (WWI, Pearl Harbor, the Battle of the Bulge, 9/11) there is a mid-level intelligence officer who found indications of an attack. Sometimes they write books – like Richard Clark. Other times they wait for the historians. They can complain that “I warned them but they didn’t listen.” For Iraq, the case is likely to be “We warned them but they wouldn’t listen.

NOTE: This post linked to Beltway Traffic Jam for 06/20/2006