Policy By Imagination Over Evidence

When I wrote about the book To Start A War, the story of how the Bush administration came to invade Iraq, I promised that I’d write a follow-on article about some of the interesting things that I learned while reading.

What made the read more relevant to me was that I was just at the International Spy Museum in Washington DC. It’s a pretty awesome museum about both the successes and failures of spying.

One of the big failures that the museum highlights was 9/11. How was it that we weren’t able to prevent it? A real argument can be made that the intelligence agencies did send up a number of increasingly alarming warnings to President Bush. Consumed with his domestic agenda of tax cuts as well as taking the CEO approach to the Presidency of ignoring operational details while focusing on strategy, President Bush did not take the threats seriously.

As easy as it is for intelligence agencies to make that argument, it doesn’t really hold up. Although they were reporting threats as late as August, the fact is that the Presidential Daily Briefings (PDB) weren’t emphatic enough to inspire action. Not that I like to quote Henry Kissinger, but back in his Secretary of State days, in a similar situation where he was informed of a situation but did not take action, he replied “I was told but not convinced”. That seems to be what happened here and the intelligence agencies bear responsibility for not being convincing enough.

This failure led to an even larger intelligence failure in the leadup to war in Iraq.

The CIA’s failure in predicting 9/11, as well as past failures such as failing to predict the fall of the USSR, led many leading officials in the Bush administration to hold a low opinion of the CIA. The director, George Tenet, was pretty desperate in his attempts to keep the CIA relevant. He brought in a customer service perspective to the CIA, thinking of President Bush as the First Customer.

While giving the customer what they want is generally a good idea when running, say, a restaurant, it turns out not to be a great idea for an intelligence agency. President Bush, along with critical members of his staff like Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Vice President Dick Cheney, somehow managed to convince themselves that Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were somehow in cahoots. This despite the fact that there was no evidence and frankly, it doesn’t even make any sense. They were equally convinced that Hussein had WMDs and was eagerly looking to give them to terrorist groups to use.

The CIA specialists in areas such as Al Qaeda, Iraq, and the Middle East in general were all in agreement that this was simply not true. Al Qaeda’s radical Islam and Hussein’s secularism (and basic survival instincts) were polar opposites. No fresh evidence of Iraqi WMDs were ever found.

There were whispers about the 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta meeting with an Iraqi agent in the Czech Republic. Based upon one person’s testimony, it was quickly proven that the person was lying. There was a Iraqi refugee claiming to have first hand knowledge of mobile biological weapons vehicles. That person was also proven to be lying. There was evidence of tubes being purchased for uranium processing. It was proven that these tubes could not be used for that function. There was evidence of Iraq buying yellow cake uranium from Niger. That was proven to be a forgery. Much intelligence was gathered by another Iraqi agent. His work was considered so suspect that he was given the code name of Curveball. Again, most of his reporting was proven to be false.

The CIA agents diligently reported the truth of all of this. None of their reporting was convincing to the Bush leadership. They took it as proof that CIA thinking was mired in some old school way of analysis.

Desperate to keep a seat at the table, Tenet began to come up with creative ways to put his thumb on the scale. In the CIA, he created a Red Cell team. This team had no Middle East expertise but was basically given the charter to come up with out of the box thinking. In the aftermath of 9/11, such thinking led naturally to potentially disastrous scenarios. The Bush administration was finally getting the CIA analysis that it was looking for. With that positive reinforcement, the CIA started getting out of the rational analysis that it should have been providing and began feeding the Bush administration the analysis that it thought that it wanted to hear.

That wasn’t the only problem. Fundamentally, the State Department and the Department of Defense hated each other. Even at the highest levels, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld were at continual loggerheads. You’d think that one of the leading generals in the Gulf War would have significant clout in such discussions, but Powell underestimated (or was not interested) in establishing a close personal relationship with President Bush. This meant that, even as he saw the folly of what was happening, he was never the so-called last person in the room with President Bush. National Security Advisor Condi Rice, brilliant in her own right, spent way too much of her energy managing the egos of the cabinet leaders and their deputies. Thinking of himself as the ‘Decider’, President Bush did not want to have such conflicts brought in front of him. Therefore, he remained oblivious to the level of dissension that actually existed on his staff.

The press was also complicit. With the media center being New York City, the site of 9/11, the media was determined not to be left behind in the chase to discover the next possible terrorist attack. Even the normally conservative New York Times ran cover stories about WMDs and Hussein’s allegedly nefarious actions that were single sourced or unconfirmed. It led to a general national anxiety and that culminated in feeling that we really need to do something to stop Hussein.

During all of this time, Hussein was letting arms inspectors in to do their work. Not only were no WMDs found, but the slight traces that were found seemed to be at least a decade old. For examples, factories would be inspected that were covered in dust and bird droppings. Clearly there had been no work done for many years. When this was reported back, it was ignored. As one Defense department official said, “We’re going to war, we’ll find it then”. It turns out, not so much.

The most significant failure was the nearly complete lack of post invasion planning. There was a general belief that Iraqis, with no history of democracy, would just rise up and start self governing themselves. The post war reconstruction would be paid for by proceeds of Iraqi oil.

This view was promulgated by Iraqi exiles such as Ahmad Chalabi. The only problem was that people like Chalabi hadn’t been to Iraq in decades. Chalabi himself had last been in Iraq forty-five years previously. The Iraq that they remembered no longer existed. At the time of the war, Iraqi literacy was around fifty percent. Its society was riven by sectarianism. There was no national Iraqi identity. This mistake ended up costing the US multiple trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of soldiers dead or injured. It cost Iraq multiple hundreds of thousands of deaths.

A final mistake was made almost immediately after fighting stopped. There was a de-Baathification effort that resulted in teachers and doctors being summarily dismissed. Arguably worse, the Iraqi army was disbanded. This had the effect of rendering tens of thousands of highly trained experienced military unemployed. From these two decisions, the ingredients for a long, bitter, internecine conflict were laid.

Of all people, the brutal Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad had the most accurate prediction before the invasion started. He said that “most Iraqis hate Saddam, all Iraqis hate the US”.

And so it came to pass.