(Article lifted directly from the NPR website, click here for the article)
All Things Considered, May 25, 2007 ·
by
The predictions of U.S. spy agencies on what to expect in post-war Iraq have mostly been proved accurate, according to a new Senate Intelligence Committee report. But several Republican senators have objected to conclusions in the report on pre-war intelligence assessments.
The senators and their staff considered a number of documents and previous investigations. But they relied most heavily on two papers from the National Intelligence Council — both of them previously classified — dated January 2003.
The papers looked at what the main challenges would be in a post-Saddam Iraq, and at the regional consequences of a war.
Their judgments turn out to be mostly on the mark, as the authors warned about the danger of sectarian violence and warned that both al-Qaida and Iran would try to exploit the situation in a post-Saddam Iraq.
The report was approved by a vote of 10-5, with two Republicans — Olympia Snowe and Chuck Hagel — crossing over to vote with the Democrats.
But the five Republicans who voted against the report have a number of issues with it.
On one front, they argue that the report's conclusions only highlight the issues that seem important to those looking at Iraq now — a prism that they say offers a distorted picture of what was presented to policymakers at the time.
The dissenters were also angry that a large chunk of the report is 81 pages of names — the people to whom the two National Intelligence Council reports were distributed.
While many of the names are blacked out, a good number of them are not.
Scooter Libby and Stephen Hadley at the White House are on page one of the report. The authors, it can be assumed, included the names for the sake of accountability, to show who had access to the warnings.
Republicans point out there are some factual inaccuracies in the list of names, saying that some people may have been on leave, or may never have seen the documents. The list, they say, sets a bad precedent.
The Senate panel has yet to produce its findings on a central question: whether the intelligence on Iraq was hyped by senior Bush administration officials to make the case for war.
3 comments:
Hey, maybe you should list me as a stringer on your blog, or a freelance reporter. Or maybe I could do a guest editorial once a week. Anyway, I figured you would like this story and want in it on your blog, which is I why told you about it.
Now, for the real issue...This story put me into something of a rage when I first heard it this afternoon, but then as I reflected on it, I decided this was nothing really new. This is the same type of behavior we consistently see from the administration: contempt for alternative views, failure to weigh facts, blind pursuit of goals regardless of negative consequences , etc.
Perhaps what makes me the most mad --ok, well one of the things that makes me the most mad--is that there are very well trained, intelligent, conscientious people working in the intelligence agencies that are made to look like fools and/or tools of the regime when they are in fact trying desperately to make informed, objective decisions based on the available facts. Maybe I am sympathetic to intelligence analysts and the like since they approach political/strategic issues in the a way that seems particularly similar to the way I have been trained to in "academia," where the point isn't to push an agenda, but to really suss out the facts, make theoreticallt and empirically informed predications about outcomes, and from there generate plausible solutions to problems.
My point is I feel a mixture of exasperation and full-blown anger when I learn that what I have long suspected to be true is just that--that rather than basing their policy decisions on the recommendations of the very people hired to make those recommendations, our leaders have consistently chosen to ignore anything that goes against what they have already decided to do.
In addition, it seems that the CIA and similar agencies often unfairly take the blame and become scapegoats (not that I am defending the CIA mind you). As an example, it easy to pass the buck for the abject failures in Iraq to bad intelligence or vague intelligence failures. But the truth would seem to be, as this report suggests, that the intelligence organizations nailed it--they predicted pretty damned accurately that an invasion of Iraq would lead to increased support and opportunity for Al-Qaeda, mass sectarian violence, and regional instability. So, the big question is this: Why does an administration choose to follow through with a plan that their own intelligence service tells them is a terrible idea?
Maybe Dick Cheney just assumed his iron will and utter contempt for humanity would be enough to create victory. Or it might just have been that he has never seen "The Princess Bride," since he then clearly would have known that he was falling "victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia."
I have nothing to add.
The more I hear about information like this, the more I can only shake my head in disbelief. I supported the invasion, put my good faith and trust in the Bush administration... and today I'm pretty much just waiting for 2008.
While I don't believe Bush and Cheney had any maleficent purpose behind their decision to invade Iraq, it is quite obvious that they had reached the conclusion to invade before choosing what data to accept as support that conclusion.
Which is exactly the wrong way to make geopolitical decisions of this magnitude. To make ANY decision or solve ANY problem, for that matter.
I'm a computer scientist by profession. I deal with and build solutions for complex problems everyday; and in that respect, Reed and I are not far apart in the way we approach problem solving. So, while my anger level is probably not quite where Reed's is, my level of exasperation is fairly close. If for no other reason than the fact that I feel my good faith and support was sorely misplaced.
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