I was thinking about the WMD fiasco in Iraq, and it occurred to me that the faulty intelligence might have more to do with beaurocracy than anything else.
The intelligence agencies are beaurocracies, and like any other their internal politics are a strong influence on the work they do. People working at the bottom of the tree may well be diligent and conscientious, but the aims of middle management are often at odds with those of the organisation as a whole. I see this all the time in the business world, often poor business decisions are taken because managers are trying to further their careers.
Individual managers need to justify their existence, and in the fight for limited resources will campaign to get their pet projects recognised. To do this, they will often over-exaggerate their importance. Sometimes this can be more innocent than I’m making it sound, people often believe (or convince themselves) that their ideas are truely in the organisation’s best interests. I wonder if this is a major reason why the WMD threat was so greatly exaggerated?
In the case of intelligence agencies there are also the external politics to consider. In trying to justify their budgets to the government, they may also tend to exaggerate threats.
I’d be interested in what people have to say about this. I’m not suggesting that these factors are completely unchecked. Both the agencies themselves and the government must be aware of their own politics to a degree, and I’m sure there are al least some genuinely contentious people working at all levels of these organisations.
Also, what does this imply for the continuing “war on terrorism”?
I’m not sure if the problem is middle managers trying to justify their jobs. Remember, even Clinton thought that Iraq either had weapons stockpiles, or could build them in a very short time. Also, from what I’ve heard, other countries intelligence agencies, like Britain’s, also believed that Saddam had weapons stockpiles, so to some extent, this problem goes beyond our own intelligence gathering agencies.
I don’t know what caused the breakdown, but I’ve heard criticisms about things like the executive order, that I think now has been recended, that CIA operatives weren’t allowed to work with “questionable characters” or known criminals or terrorists, you know, the people who would actually be in the know about what’s going on with their fellow criminals and terrorists. And also the fact that there’s hardly any spies that look Middle Eastern or speak Arabic, something they are trying to remedy now, even though it’s a little too late. But there are problaby more reasons than just those two.
Anyway, as for what this implies for the continuing “war on terrorism,” to me it implies that, unless Bush gets rid of his pride, admits his information was wrong, and orders sweeping reforms of the intelligence communities, we’ll loose even more credibility than we’ve already lost. However, as long as Bush stays Presidient, the war will go on. If he loses the next election…???
Yes, but Clinton was getting his information on WMD from the same source - the intelligence agencies. I’m British myself, my criticisms above would apply equally to other intelligence services, not just the ones in the US.
I’d agree that problems like these would also affect the quality of intelligence, and that we don’t have the full story here. However, in in my original post I was referring to a possible tendency to to over-exaggerate threats, not problems with the actual quality of the intelligence gathered.
OK, sticking purely with the question of whether or not middle management over-exaggerate’s threats in order to keep their jobs and secure funds from the government for their budgets, that’s a tough one to answer, seeing as how I have no inside information on American or British intelligence agencies. But if I had to make a guess, I’d say that the problem wasn’t about that. I say that because this seems to be the first time that the Intelligence agencies blundered so badly like this, unless of course this is the start of a new trend, which I sincerely doubt. Also, if people in the agencies were doing this on a regular basis, chances are, and again, I’m just guessing here, but chances are we wouldn’t have had the Koreans making a surprise announcement of “Hey, guess what, we have the bomb, you’d better do as we say, or else…”
Yes, but is this really the first intelligence blunder of this magnitude? Or simply the first time intelligence information has been such a big factor in deciding to go to war?
I don’t know the answer to that. To find out, I’d have to do a lot of on-line research, or take a shower, get dressed, and drive down to the local library and read a lot of books. Both of which I don’t feel like bothering to do right now
I’m hoping that a Doper, more knowledgeable about history will come in and add to this conversation.
Me too. My search isn’t turning up much. The nearest parallel I’ve been able to find is the Spanish-American war. A US warship blew-up, and it was blamed on Spanish sabotage, and as a result the US declared war. But was more likely an accident. It wasn’t well understood how unstable cordite is at the time.
I see the situation very differently, and I have trouble reconciling my view with the way the issue is playing out in the political world.
I have yet to see how the intelligence community made such a huge blunder.
The Republican talking points on this issue are quick to point out that Clinton believed the same intelligence. Granted, I say, yet Clinton didn’t go off starting wars based on that intelligence.
It appears to me that the intelligence is simply being used as a scapegoat. The desire to find Iraq in violation of UNSC resolution certainly pre-dates 9/11. Even before he was elected president, Bush tossed out the gauntlet.
What you have is an administration guilty of neo-con groupthink. Bush surrounded himself with a small group that all see the world through the same war-colored glasses. And then the only intelligence that was given credence was the intelligence that supported their world-view.
Take the Niger yellow cake example. The CIA got it right, but the administration still twisted it to support their objectives. That isn’t a failure of the intelligence community, it is a failure of executive leadership and judgement.
I think the biggest problem is in people who are being overly anxious to lable it a “fiasco” without looking at the situation with any more than a microscope. They are jumping to conclusions without a very solid foundation.
What we have now is dots that don’t connect in any sensible way. Rather than using this as an indication that we are missing something important, there are some who choose to use this to denigrate and impugn. For something this important, that is a tragedy. We need to know why WMD’s are so hard to find when we know they were there, we know that there was significant deceptive behaviors regarding them, and we have no means to assure us that they have been destroyed.
Well, one thing I’ve heard is that Iraqi scientists got money from the Saddam government by asking for funds to work on WMD’s, and then when they got the money, they kept most of it for themselves, thus, even Saddam thought he had some weapons stockpiles, according to reports I’ve heard on the news anyway.
My guess so far is that the intel about Iraq has always been spotty about WMDs, but the current admin made the “Office of Special Plans”, a Pentagon unit that some say was created to filter intel to agree with the political agenda.
I cannot say if these claims are true, but it would explain the situation pretty well. The problem with intel since forever is that there is pressure to color it and tweak it to satisfy the bosses’ preconceived ideas.
Do a Google news search for “Office of Special Plans” and you’ll find a load of articles.
It now emerges that we Brits did not have any intelligence stating that Saddam was an imminent threat (not in 2002-3 anyway). It was the men in goverment who ‘strengthened the language’ of our intelligence until it was actually false, then presented it to the public.
The intelligence agencies control what the government knows, but the government controls what the public know. They will manipulate it for political ends and since intelligence matters are covered by national security, they may never be found out. In this case, the evidence is against them and the cat is out of the bag.
When the US & UK governments spend months justifying a war on the WMD issue, and are then unable to find any real evidence of their existance, I think the word “fiasco” is justified. Bear in mind, I’m not completely opposed to the war, I regard it as possibly being the lesser evil compared to leaving Saddam in power. However, I find it disturbing that our governments can lead us into war (resulting in thousands of deaths) on such a spurious issue.
I’d agree there was good reason to believe Saddam was hiding something, he had a long history of non-cooperation with the UN inspectors. However, its now clear that whatever he was hiding it wasn’t a full-blown, useable weapons program. I find it hard to believe that, given the large numbers of high-ranking Iraqi officials captured, no evidence couldn’t have been found by now if a military scale operation existed.
You are assuming the WMDs were really there in the first place.
I agree we should be very cautious about assigning blame. However, politicians have a long history of avoiding accountability. We have a right to know why we were led into a war on the basis of false information.
yet another misperception. As in the SOTU 2003, imminent threat was what the US would pre-empt. The only way to determine an imminent threat with terrorists is when it has already been implemented. For those who think the action would be precipitous or ‘cowboyish’ or whatever, they only have to either look at what has really happened from a global perspective or consider Bush’s answer to Russert recently.
As far as WMD and the conspiracy theories. First is that WMD was only the most convenient of many reasons. For those who are thinking it is a political spin job, they should consider resolution 1441, which assumed WMD and promised consequences if certain actions were not taken and was unanimously approved by the security council.
It might suit personal feelings to try to play the blame game and single out a single figure for invective and suspicion, but, to me, it seems that such an approach leaves out entirely too many significant and very visible factors that contradict it.
We had more evidence that they were destroyed than that they remained. In fact, some of the UN weapons inspectors removed by Bush, not Saddam, in the advent of war claim that there was no possibility that Saddam had any WMD programs of any long-range use (see Scott Ritter and William Rivers-Pitt). Robin Cook resigned because there was ‘no evidence’ of any WMD - and he’d seen the original intelligence.
I think blaming the intelligence community reeks of scapegoating… but the cold war created the same sort of “giving them what they want to see” attitude.
Over reporting means playing safe. Underestimating a threat backfires more easily.
Creating bigger threats justified huge budgets in the intelligence and military areas.
Alarmism creates more response than balanced reports…
During the Cold War the Soviet threat was immensly exagerrated in various areas… now its Terrorism.
The problem with blaming the “bureaucracy” of screwing up the WMD intel on Iraq is that the administration created a new office (SimonX’s favorite, the OSP) to bypass the analysts and paper pushers of the CIA and other intelligence agencies. The conservative estimates were ignored, and “cherry-picking” and “stovepiping” of intelligence occurred.
Now this is news. Even to the U.N. - where did you get this information? Where can I find out more? How come it isn’t all over the place spouted by the anti-war crowds?
Everything I have seen or heard, from U.N. resolutions to Blix to the U.S. says that we did not have solid evidence of the destruction of the Iragi WMD programs and materiale.
And where is any evidence that they existed? We now have access to any location in Iraq, have captured a large percentage of the Iraqi regime’s top officials, and most Iraqis now have little reason to lie about the weapons programs existence. I’d say that this is pretty clear evidence that large scale WMD programs were not being conducted in Iraq.
