These Stories Cast Fresh Doubt on Bush’s Pre-war Planning

Two stories indicating that the Bush administration ignored warnings form the intelligence community and plunged ahead with plans for the Iraq war. These stories disturb me for two reasons: 1) As a former Senior Intelligence Analyst, I would like to believe that careful work and truth telling informs policy decisions; and 2) The administration is developing a Global Strike Plan that includes preemptive attack as an option. Pre-emption can – barely – be compatible with the Just War criteria of last resort. This is true only in the case of morally certain intelligence warnings of an immanent attack. In this case, the administration overrode warnings that an attack was not immanent.

These two stories indicate that War plans were based on assumptions that intelligence analysts thought to be faulty. Intelligence reform efforts, to date, have overlooked concentrated on fixing the intelligence community and ignored the role of top administration officials. Here are the stories:

Intelligence Watch has a link to a story from Central Command Intelligence Analyst Gregory Hooker Planning for the Iraq war was hobbled by tensions between Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and military planners over the staying power of Saddam Hussein's regime, by leaks of highly classified war plans and by little attention to the war's aftermath, according to a new insider account. A top intelligence analyst at the U.S. military's Central Command writes that near-constant demands from Rumsfeld and his aides for new versions of the war plan using fewer American troops wasted time and diverted attention from fleshing out a blueprint for the March 2003 invasion. Civilians in Washington, convinced that Saddam's regime would topple easily, "injected numerous ideas into the dialogue, many of which were amateurish and unrealistic," wrote the analyst, Gregory Hooker. Many of those ideas were discarded, but the conflicting approaches never were resolved before the invasion, he says. Hooker's account was published this week by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

On Sunday, May 22, WaPo reporter Walter Pincus wrote “…it appears that even before the war many senior intelligence officials in the government had doubts about the case being trumpeted in public by the president and his senior advisers.”

Pincus writes the intelligence community’s doubt about the Iraqi source known as “curveball.” As readers of this blog have known since April 6, doubts about curveball were overlooked in the Senate Report.

For a long time I thought that the intelligence failure was do to the fact that the community did not do its programmatic analysis. Now it appears that this would have made little difference.

All in all, it is a very dismal picture of the Bush administration – not that John Kerry would have been any better.