Ex-CIA Official Faults Use of Data on Iraq, Does Anybody Care?

[Knorf]

In this article at the Washington Post website (note, requires registration), former national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005 Robert R. Pillar has some pretty negative thigns to say about the Bush administrations’s handling of Iraq intelligence.

He says that Bush

@Robert R. Pillar

…went to war without requesting – and evidently without being influenced by – any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq.

Also:

@Robert R. Pillar

It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made…

According to the article:

@Washington Post

The result of the requests, and public statements by the president, Vice President Cheney and others, led analysts and managers to conclude the United States was heading for war well before the March 2003 invasion, Pillar asserted.

They thus knew, he wrote, that senior policymakers "would frown on or ignore analysis that called into question a decision to go to war and welcome analysis that supported such a decision. . . .

Also:

@Washington Post

Pillar wrote that the prewar intelligence asserted Hussein’s “weapons capacities,” but he said the “broad view” within the United States and overseas "was that Saddam was being kept ‘in his box’ " by U.N. sanctions, and that the best way to deal with him was through “an aggressive inspections program to supplement sanctions already in place.”

and finally:

@Robert R. Pillar

If the entire body of official intelligence analysis on Iraq had a policy implication, it was to avoid war – or, if war was going to be launched, to prepare for a messy aftermath.

Now here’s the big question: does anybody care about this anymore? Hasn’t it been resolved that, post-9/11, anything the president decides regarding national security in foreign affairs is, politically speaking on a national scale, above criticism?

[CLedet]

Our grandkids will still debate this when we’re dead and gone. Search for Pearl Harbor threads, some still hold the position that the US knew it was coming. The Iraq war will be no different.

[Lynwood_Slim]

This article and book behind it, which I hope to read soon, seems to help settle one important question: did the Bushies manipulate intelligence? The answer here seems generally to be “no”. They basically ignored it.

In other words, Bush’s main reason for going to war was not because of WMD’s (the intelligence was unsound). We went to war for political reasons, not because of immiment security threats. The war’s aftermath was clearly a boodoggle. Wars and/or their aftermaths usually are. I can’t think of any largescale war that was not.

I happen to agree with the political reasons for which we went to war. I never bought the WMD argument to begin with.

If one were to read Woodward’s Plan of Attack, he shows this very clearly. This is not new news. Hasn’t anyone read that book?

[_Ava]

I read the Woodward book, and I found it lacking. He lost his journalistic credibility long ago. He made a bargain with the current administration to get exclusive access by being their mouthpiece. What makes it worse is that he sold his former reputation to do it. The administration wanted to co-opt him because he was the Watergate guy. I thought this when the book first came out. After his more recent lapse of judgment where he failed to tell his paper what he knew about Libby, I don’t think his reputation can ever recover.

I’ve seen quite a few CIA sources who said in interviews that the CIA and weapons inspector-related intelligence was pretty sound, but that the administration ignored it on purpose because it didn’t support their already-established agenda. From what I read in the paper and on line today, that’s apparently what this CIA guy says too.

I think it should matter tremendously, but it seems that americans no longer have any expectation that their leaders will do the right thing, make smart choices, or have forward-looking policies. Hawks and doves can disagree on what the best policy is, but I sure hope that both would be appalled at the persons in charge making decisions without weighing the best evidence.

[Digital_Stimulus]

@Lynwood Slim

I happen to agree with the political reasons for which we went to war.

I do hope you mean that as concerns foreign, not domestic, politics. Right?

[Sevastopol]

Bush’s main cadre of supporters are delighted with each item of news that comes out confirming that their boy duped the enemy. Not Iraq of course, the blue states.

Listen, they are no more stupid than the general population of this message board, who knew, or had it revealed to them by good and reasoned argument that pretty much from Day 1 the whole thing was a con.

The only resentment among Bush-supporting America, is that their president was obligated to give a reason for invading another country, full of Arabs at that. When the reason was plain as day, before your very eyes. So it is a comfort and a win that the reason given was naked, casual and easily discoverable falsification.