- Guess who's already calling around town in search of
figures to be named to the "independent commission" to investigate
intelligence failures in Iraq (and elsewhere), according to the New York
Times? As Douglas Jehl and David E. Sanger report (Commission to Decide
Itself on Depth of Its Investigation), "Mr. Bush, the White House
said, plans to appoint the members himself, though Vice President Cheney
has been calling around Capitol Hill sounding out ideas." The Great
Sounder-Outer. I wonder what an idea Dick sounds out sounds like?
-
- A name, a name... what's in a name? In the rigged crapshoot
that's the commission to be, two curious and fascinating names have already
floated by. The planned nine-member panel, White House officials said,
"would include current and former officials with experience in intelligence
matters." Among the names Washington Post reporters Dana Milbank and
Dana Priest mention (Intelligence Panel Will Cast Net Beyond Iraq) is that
of former CIA director James Woolsey. He would certainly be a fabulous
addition to any merry band of pranksters this administration put together.
-
- As Paul Woodward, editor of the always interesting War
in Context website comments, "If James Woolsey -- a man who before
the war merrily tried to popularize the slogan, 'Give war a chance' --
is included in this commission it will be exposed as an utter charade."
Woolsey, who also popularized the idea -- post-the-Afghan but pre-the-Iraqi
war -- that we were already enmeshed in "World War IV" and rushed
off on a bizarre series of semi-private intelligence adventures for members
of the administration, won't make the cut, I suspect. But just seeing his
name surface adds a bit of zest to this black (or is it bleak) comedy.
-
- Among those being considered for the commission are Robert
Gates, CIA director under Daddy Bush; William Perry, former Secretary of
Defense under Bill Clinton and a hard-line "realist"; former
CIA director William H. Webster; and the CIA's David A. Kay, who started
this ball rolling by pronouncing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq DOA,
but then gave the president a helping hand by focusing everyone on the
intelligence agencies not the administration, and broke bread with uncurious
George only two days ago. Among this gallery of clinkers, probably the
single most important name to surface, on Monday on the front page of the
New York Times no less -- a name I've been waiting a while to see -- was
Brent Scowcroft. Sanger of the Times wrote (Bush to Establish Panel to
Examine U.S. Intelligence):
-
- "Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director,
said Sunday that they were talking to 'very distinguished statesmen and
women [none of the lists I've yet seen mention a woman], who have served
their country and who have been users of intelligence, or served in a gathering
capacity.' Among those who have been consulted, officials say, is Brent
Scowcroft, the national security adviser under Mr. Bush's father. Mr Scowcroft
was a harsh critic of the process by which the current president decided
to go to war."
-
- If Scowcroft, who co-authored a book with the elder Bush
and is considered his alter ego in the world, has now surfaced as a major
consultant of Bush the Younger, then a triumvirate of Daddy's Boys -- family
fixer James Baker, supposedly off to alleviate Iraqi indebtedness, Robert
Blackwill, now sitting somewhere in the White House helping Condoleezza
Rice coordinate Iraq policy, and Scowcroft -- are all back in town. Since
Baker's recent high-profile travels around the world on the debt-relief
question, he seems to have mysteriously dropped from sight.
-
- In this Oedipus wrecks of an administration, the psychological
tug-of-war between son and father has gotten far too little attention in
our media. Whatever's been going on in the Bush family has surely been
weirder than anybody's been willing to let on. Now, it seems that Daddy's
Boys are in town to save the day for Daddy's Boy (Who Wanted to Be Someone
Else). Your guess is as good as mine, but with George's numbers dropping
under the Florida 50% mark for the first time in poll after poll, with
Kerry suddenly eating the President alive in the same polls (and other
Democratic candidates looking ever more competitive), with Iraq a seemingly
unstaunchable wound, with the economy a disaster-in-the-making, and job
growth more or less nonexistent, and the budget over the top of who knows
what, and 2004 looking bleaker by the second, something, as Sherlock Holmes
would say, is afoot. I would say, hold onto your hat, Dick Cheney.
-
- (Here, by the way, are the latest results from the Quinnipiac
poll, typical of the rest: "In possible 2004 presidential matchups,
Kerry beats Bush 51 - 43 percent, compared to a 49 - 45 percent Bush lead
January 26. Bush beats all other Democrats: 49 - 44 percent over Dean,
down from 54 - 38 percent January 26; 47 - 45 percent over Edwards, down
from 50 - 42 percent; 48 - 45 percent over Clark, down from 51 - 41 percent.")
-
- In the meantime, the urge to get the now-embarrassing
question of "intelligence" off the table until 2005 has moved
to the top of the administration agenda. As we watch this farce unfold,
let's keep in mind what we learned from former Treasury Secretary Paul
O'Neill the other week. In this administration's first National Security
Council meetings in February 2001, the subject of al Qaeda wasn't even
on the table, but the taking down of Saddam Hussein and war in Iraq was.
From the beginning, the issue was never "intelligence." The people
who took power that January had been writing and lobbying on the subject
of toppling Saddam's Iraq and transforming the Middle East since the early
1990s and already thought they had intelligence enough with plenty to spare.
What was at stake was never more or better or more accurate intelligence,
but finding an opening, the right moment that would sweep Congress and
the American people up in war fever. They weren't waiting for information
about, say, an "imminent" threat; the
- It's now well known that, within a day of the 9/11 attacks
our Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was calling for preparations for
a future war against Iraq. Only afterwards did Rumsfeld and the rest of
the crew go looking for "intelligence" -- and not any intelligence,
nor intelligence from anyone, however knowledgeable. Mostly they fell like
so many swooning suitors into the lying arms (if arms can lie) of Ahmed
Chalabi and other Iraqi exiles and defectors, themselves desperately out
of touch with the situation in Iraq, or out to make a buck, get a (well-funded)
life, or take over a country.
-
- It's also well known that when the Bush men ran into
intelligence -- in either sense of the word -- that contradicted their
scheme of things, they hustled it out of the room at top speed. When Army
Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, for instance, suggested to a congressional
committee that it might take several hundred thousand troops to occupy
Iraq, he was, if not drummed out of the service, then more or less laughed
off the administration premises by Paul Wolfowitz et al. Christopher Dickey
of Newsweek makes the point cogently in a recent piece (Tinker, Tailor,
Jurist, Spy):
-
- "Such estimates, said Wolfowitz, were wildly 'off
the mark,' and a figure of 100,000 was closer to the Pentagon's expectations.
Well, the number of U.S. troops has been kept fairly close to that promised
level of 100,000. (Those Pentagon bureaucrats do have iron wills.) But
there's no question that many more troops were needed, and badly. 'A safe
and secure environment' still doesn't exist in Iraq, and from the start
'the normal responsibilities' of occupiers simply have not been met. The
borders were not secured. The cities were abandoned to looters. (To this
day, Baghdad is without electricity for hours at a time.) More than 500
Americans are dead, most of them killed during the occupation. The monetary
costs are upward of $1 billion a week and the chances of Iraqi or foreign
forces effectively easing that burden are distant and slight."
-
- When Larry Lindsey, then the President's chief economic
adviser, suggested that it might take up to couple of hundred million dollars
to run an occupation (Don Rumsfeld was then suggesting under $50 million)
-- neither came faintly close, of course -- he landed on his ear in the
street. Don't you just love it?
-
- In the "intelligence community," significant
figures questioned everything. Take, for instance, Greg Thielmann, before
the war director of the Office of Strategic Proliferation and Military
Affairs in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research who
recently commented (Charles M. Sennott and Farah Stockman, 'Drawing their
own picture', the Boston Globe):
-
- "'[David A.] Kay says we all got it wrong. Well,
that's not the case...The White House was not interested in information
other than that which substantiated its case.' After 25 years in government
service, Thielmann, 53, said he chose early retirement last fall, in part
because of his frustration with the Bush administration. 'They took every
piece of information, and all the way up the line, it was made less qualified
and more alarming. That is why the American people were so misled about
the nature of the Iraqi threat.'"
- As Toronto Sun columnist Eric Margolis put the matter
this Sunday (A scandal greater than Watergate):
-
- "Now, the White House is trying to blame the Central
Intelligence Agency for the Iraq fiasco. CIA director George Tenet may
have wronged his agency and the nation by not going public to debunk White
House war propaganda over Iraq. But active and retired CIA officers kept
warning the public and media (including this writer) that intelligence
on Iraq had been deeply manipulated and politicized by a cabal of pro-war
neo-conservative ideologues in the Pentagon and the vice president's office.
-
- "They were ignored."
-
- Of course, if you really want to know what the neocons
and hardliners in the Pentagon and the vice president's office thought
of planning, no less intelligence, just consider how they left the State
Department's multimillion-dollar postwar planning in the dust in their
rush into Baghdad (and hundreds of State Department Arabists, who actually
knew the language and a great deal about Iraq itself, idling in Washington)
while they hustled into downtown Baghdad with no plans of their own --
other than to save the oil ministry, establish permanent bases in-country,
strip the economy, hand what was left of the nation over to Chalabi, and
then turn their armed attention on Syria and Iran. They didn't even bring
translators and laptops, as far as I can tell, when they settled into what
has come to be known as the Green Zone in the capital. What they had in
tow (or soon imported to rectify matters) were a bunch of 90-day wonders,
neocon kids planning to get a little hands-on experience before returning
to Washington t
- Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek recently compared what the
U.N. inspectors in Iraq knew to what American intelligence agencies didn't
(We Had Good Intel -- the U.N.'s):
-
- "Why were the inspectors right and the administration
wrong? Partly this has to do with political pressure. The CIA had been
battered for 30 years by accusations from the right that it was soft on
the Soviets, soft on the Chinese and most recently soft on Saddam. (Never
mind that in almost every case, the agency was more accurate in its assessments
than its neoconservative accusers. It lost the political battle.) The U.N.
inspectors could actually make their assessments without fear. (Some in
the administration did try to scare them. 'We will not hesitate to discredit
you,' Vice President Cheney said to [Hans] Blix before he began his job.)
More important, the inspectors were actually there on the ground and the
American government was not. Some reports suggest that the United States
did not have a single credible informant in Iraq before the war."
-
- When the administration got its intelligence from the
CIA, undoubtedly somewhat tailored to the needs of the war party, but still
to their eyes a glass disappointingly only half-full, Rumsfeld set up his
own intelligence outfit, the Office of Special Plans (OSP), run by Douglas
Feith out of the Pentagon, to come up with the necessary "intelligence"
to do the job, while the vice president repeatedly traveled to CIA headquarters
in Langley, Virginia to pressure the agency for better results (as the
indefatigable Jim Lobe points out in a piece included below).
-
- It would, of course, be ridiculous to go back now to
consider "intelligence failures" in isolation from administration
actions, though some of those failures are quite hilarious. Take the Iraqi
UAVs, light observation planes that were supposed to be capable of spraying
the East Coast of the U.S. (hundreds of miles inland, no less) with deadly
toxins. The President actually discussed these fearsome planes on television
with a straight face before the war and just about no one in the media,
no less the Democratic Party, bothered to challenge him on the subject.
Democratic Senator Nelson of Florida even claims to this day to have taken
this threat so seriously that he voted for George's thrilling war.
-
- According to the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler and
Walter Pincus, who recently reviewed the UAV story, which at the time barely
saw the light of day in our media (Misfires of a 'smoking gun' in Iraq
debate), the senator came down in favor of "a resolution authorizing
force against Iraq precisely because of the administration's UAV evidence.
'I was told,' [Nelson said,] 'not only that [Saddam had weapons of mass
destruction] and that he had the means to deliver them through unmanned
aerial vehicles, but that he had the capability of transporting those UAVs
outside of Iraq and threatening the homeland here in America, specifically
by putting them on ships off the eastern seaboard.'"
-
- The planes, of course, turned out to be observation planes,
largely made out of Popsicle sticks. But the honest truth was that you
didn't have to have any intelligence agency behind you, just a modicum
of intelligence, or simple commonsense, to know that this was a ludicrous
idea. (And I wrote exactly that before the Iraq War was ever launched.)
I'm sorry, but how were these deadly planes to get from Iraq to the East
Coast of the United States in order to become an imminent danger? On tramp
steamers, I suppose.
-
- Actually, as far as I'm concerned, the wrong trait is
being investigated. There should be a genuinely independent commission
to investigate not "intelligence" but "arrogance."
I've long said that this administration has been staffed by utopian (or,
depending on your druthers, dystopian) dreamers intent on remaking a recalcitrant
world in their own image. (It's what Marxists were always accused of.)
They were going to control the planet. What was a little cherry-picked
intelligence from the perspective of transforming the world? Now, of course,
"intelligence" matters, and we're going to act as if all this
is serious, but hey, I'm planning to be amused.
-
- Below, Jim Lobe discusses the "lie-saver" David
A Kay threw the President and how, by embracing this commission, George
and his advisers are attempting to sweep their string of foreign policy
catastrophes under the carpet. James Carroll, in his latest Boston Globe
column, has a somewhat different take on how the administration is using
the debate over intelligence.
-
- My only comment: Maybe the administration can manage
to sweep the "intelligence failures" of Iraq under the Washington
rug for a while, but it's amazing how much is already under there. There's
the 9/11 commission, still being stonewalled in various ways; there's the
Valerie Plame outing investigation; there are those old Cheney energy meetings
being stonewalled straight up to the Supreme Court; various incipient Halliburton
scandals; and I'm sure each of you can think of more of the same; not to
speak of all sorts of barely contained angers, resentments and animosities
in the intelligence agencies and the military, in the State Department
and the bureaucracy. Sooner or later -- my guess is well before November
4 -- that rug's just not going to cover the mess any longer.
-
- -----
- Tomdispatch.com is researched, written and edited by
Tom Engelhardt, a fellow at the Nation Institute, for anyone in despair
over post-September 11th US mainstream media coverage of our world and
ourselves. The service is intended to introduce you to voices from elsewhere
(even when the elsewhere is here) who might offer a clearer sense of how
this imperial globe of ours actually works.
-
- An editor in publishing for the last 25 years, Tom is
the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism
in the Cold War era. He is at present consulting editor for Metropolitan
Books, a fellow of the Nation Institute, and a teaching fellow at the journalism
school of the University of California, Berkeley.
-
- Reprinted from TomDispatch:
- http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/index.mhtml?pid=1232
- http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=14830&mode=nested&order=0
|