A Different Kind of Intelligence Failure
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| Sat, 04-17-2004 - 8:45pm |
April 17, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
A Different Kind of Intelligence Failure
By ADLAI E. STEVENSON III
CHICAGO — Intelligence failures are to blame, so we are told, for the tragedy of 9/11 and the unfolding catastrophe in Iraq. If the Bush administration had heeded its intelligence agencies, say its opponents, it might have prevented the 9/11 attacks and avoided its mishaps in Iraq. Administration officials, meanwhile, say that their intelligence was either not accurate or not "actionable." This finger-pointing reflects misconceptions about the nature of intelligence — and suggests an intelligence failure of a different sort.
If one looks closely enough, there is generally a chance to see what lies ahead. For instance, shortly after the Six Day War in 1967, I trailed Israel's troops into the West Bank and Golan Heights and visited a Palestinian refugee camp. Ten years later I returned. By then — especially after Israel announced its plans to build settlements in the West Bank — anyone with experience in the region could foresee the dangers to come.
When I was in the Senate, I conducted a study of terrorism, which concluded in 1979 with predictions of "spectacular acts of disruption and destruction" in the United States and proposals for preventing them. These recommendations required no use of foreign intelligence. Similarly, the chaos in Iraq should come as no surprise to anyone with knowledge of Iraq, a quasi-state of tribes, religions, sects, ethnicities and foreign interests carved from the carcass of the Ottoman Empire.
Foreign intelligence supports foreign policy. Its priorities are determined by policy makers. Sometimes the products of foreign intelligence are tailored to fit the preconceptions of policy makers. Intelligence is often flawed. The intelligence agencies have conflicting and overlapping missions, lack central responsibility and are overwhelmed with information, much of it technical. It requires "production" — often without the necessary regional specialists and linguists.
Investigating the Iran intelligence failure in the late 1970's, I learned that the C.I.A. had no analyst who spoke Farsi. The agencies rely on foreign intelligence services, which support the policies of their own governments.
Foreign policy in the Bush administration reflects a lack of experience in the real world away from a Washington overrun with armchair polemicists and think-tank ideologues. Too many inhabitants of this world have no experience in the military, where one learns to expect the unexpected, or in international finance, where America's vulnerability also resides. This White House is well known for its hostility to curiosity and intellectual debate.
After all, terrorism is not a phenomenon of recent origin. Gavrilo Princip, the Serb nationalist who assassinated Archduke Ferdinand in 1914, did not expect his gunshot to bring about the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He expected only a reaction — and the empire's reaction led to World War I and its own downfall. The United States government's reaction to the attacks of 9/11 could end up inflicting great damage on America.
The Bush administration demonstrates the point. One pre-emptive war against the dictator of a desert quasi-state crippled by international sanctions has stretched the American military thin. The United States is widely perceived to be waging war against Islam in the Middle East, a perception reinforced by the president's decision this week to support Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel and his settlement plan.
Meanwhile, the dollar — a barometer of confidence in the American economy and polity — has sunk against other currencies. In Spain, Argentina, Germany, South Korea and Pakistan, candidates win public office by denouncing or distancing themselves from the Bush administration. This record owes nothing to failures of intelligence.
Studies have recommended reforms of the intelligence community. But reform does not change the limited nature and function of intelligence. There is no substitute for the pragmatic intelligence of policy makers acquired from history and experience in the real world — and the courage to act on it.
Before 9/11, neoconservatives like Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, and Vice President Dick Cheney inhabited a world of contending great powers in which force and technology were transcendent. Terrorists armed with box cutters — and now Iraqis resisting the occupation — have exploded their fantasy. The failures of the Bush administration are not those of foreign intelligence but of a cerebral sort of intelligence.
Adlai E. Stevenson III is a former United States senator from Illinois.

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Let me just ask you. If you were engaged in a war and saw a crack in the enemy's resolve, would you do everything in your power to enlarge that crack? This is what they do. They see dissent over here and they kill more of OUR INNOCENT - NON MILITARY to enlarge that crack. Peace through STRENGTH is the only thing that works. When we undermine our own country's efforts at a time of war it gets our people killed in greater numbers. It give the enemy the will to continue killing our military in hopes that we will give up as we did in Viet Nam and just go home. Without the support of OUR COUNTRY'S left-wing, the enemy would give up sooner, maybe by now. I find this incredibly irresponsible.
Read this:
"...On September 11, dozens of capable airplane passengers allowed themselves to be overpowered by a handful of poorly armed terrorists because they did not comprehend the depth of hatred that motivated their captors.
On September 11, thousands of innocent people were murdered because too many Americans naively reject the reality that some nations are dedicated to the dominance of others. Many political pundits, pacifists and media personnel want us to forget the carnage. They say we must focus on the bravery of the rescuers and ignore the cowardice of the killers. They implore us to understand the motivation of the perpetrators. Major television stations have announced they will assist the healing process by not replaying devastating footage of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers.
I will not be manipulated.
I will not pretend to understand.
I will not forget.
I will not forget the liberal media who abused freedom of the press to kick our country when it was vulnerable and hurting.
I will not forget that CBS anchor Dan Rather preceded President Bush's address to the nation with the snide remark, "No matter how you feel about him, he is still our president."
I will not forget that ABC TV anchor Peter Jennings questioned President Bush's motives for not returning immediately to Washington, DC and commented, "We're all pretty skeptical and cynical about Washington."
And I will not forget that ABC's Mark Halperin warned if reporters weren't informed of every little detail of this war, they aren't "likely -- nor should they be expected -- to show deference."
I will not isolate myself from my fellow Americans by pretending an attack on the USS Cole in Yemen was not an attack on the United States of America....
...I will not forget the moral victory handed the North Vietnamese by American war protesters who reviled and spat upon the returning soldiers, airmen, sailors and marines.
I will not be softened by the wishful thinking of pacifists who chose reassurance over reality.
I will embrace the wise words of Prime Minister Tony Blair who told the Labor Party conference, "They have no moral inhibition on the slaughter of the innocent. If they could have murdered not 7,000 but 70,000, does anyone doubt they would have done so and rejoiced in it?
There is no compromise possible with such people, no meeting of minds, no point of understanding with such terror. Just a choice: defeat it or be defeated by it. And defeat it we must!"...
-- Ed Evans, MGySgt., USMC (Ret.)
Not as lean, Not as mean, But still a Marine.
Gettingahandle
Ignorance is Nature's most abundant fuel for decision making.
Be very clear what Ted Kennedy means when he shouts, “Iraq is George Bush’s Vietnam!” The Chappaquidick Kid is really saying that he wants Iraq to be another Vietnam. He wants America to lose...
...As every objective commentator and historian has noted, America won the Vietnam War militarily but lost it politically. Perhaps the most famous example is the Tet Offensive of 1968, which was an incredible military defeat for North Vietnam -- yet spun by liberal journalists like Walter Cronkite of CBS into a defeat for the U.S. The pathologically biased liberal reporting and televising of the Vietnam War turned so much public opinion against the war that the political will to win was lost.
The liberal Alphabet Media is once again doing its best to snatch American defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq. This time, however, there is a very big difference:
In the intervening 30 years between the Vietnam and Iraq wars, the liberals have lost their media monopoly.
With Vietnam, you had three choices to watch the first “televised war” -- CBS, NBC, ABC. When was the last time you bothered to watch any of them? I haven’t in years. There are just too many alternatives.
And not just on television, like Fox News. There’s talk radio...
...Scores of millions of Americans learn and discuss their news from all of these, then pass it around and share it via email.
Possibly you will choose to share this very essay with a number of your email friends. One small act, like so many millions of others, that adds to the dilution of the liberal media monopoly.
Yes, the liberals still have their bastions of defeatist propaganda, the Gray Lady, the WaPo, the Counterfeit Network News, Rather-Brokaw-Jennings. But what they don’t have is an information monopoly that enables them to con the American people into losing a war.
That’s the real difference between Vietnam and Iraq, and is the reason why this time, we get to win.
-Jack Wheeler
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/4/20/105319.shtml
This most recent surge of violence is NOT the purview solely of Ba'ath party members making a last ditch effort. In all likelihood, they're involved but it's spread to a coalition of Ba'athists, former criminals, more fundamentalist type Muslims, and probably now, most alarmingly, average citizens who are wondering what the heck America can do if it can't keep peace and is killing, even if accidentally, civilians.
The link I posted was not an op-ed piece. Moreover, it was written by an embedded (Pentagon guidelines, etc) reporter with the St. Louis Post Dispatch,my hometown newspaper. Do you really think that anybody who finds the war alarming needs their thoughts and opinions pre-digested?! I am not a left-wing elitist but I can see the writing on the wall!
You may recall I mentioned last week that labels are limiting. Why not drop the labels and respond to the points?
Gettingahandle
Ignorance is Nature's most abundant fuel for decision making.
Campaigning on Defeat
By Fred Thompson
Friday, April 16, 2004; Page A21
Even the most partisan critics of the war in Iraq insist they are every bit as determined as President Bush to secure a democratic peace there. Regardless of whether the administration's decision to go to war was correct, they say, the United States cannot now afford to cut and run.
Yet, even as the president's opponents give lip service to the importance of victory, they seize upon every setback suffered, exploit every challenge ahead, to suggest that defeat is inevitably what our nation is doomed to suffer. Their fatalism is often veiled -- allusions to Vietnam, innuendo about quagmires -- but the implications are clear. For the president's critics, there is a domestic constituency to be won from failure abroad. They are campaigning on defeat.
To be sure, there can and should be a robust debate this year about the tactics and strategy adopted by the Bush administration in the global war on terrorism, including its choice to remove Saddam Hussein from power. But that should be a debate about how to win. Those who believe going after the Middle East's most brutal dictator was a distraction that has exacerbated the problem of terrorism still have an obligation to explain what they would do in Iraq now that we're there. How would they secure victory?
But instead of trying to chart a path of progress, many of the president's critics have devoted themselves to fomenting public despair over a war that, they keep repeating, should never have been fought. They lament the money "wasted" on the Iraqi people and the damage done to America's reputation in its struggle against Islamist insurgents. They even suggest that Iraq is worse off today for having been freed from the grip of a tyrant -- never mind what the majority of Iraqis themselves might think.
While some cynics may dismiss the hand-wringing from the halls of Congress and elsewhere as little more than electioneering, its effects are far more profound.
This is not just a question of political honesty. The global war on terrorism is not a game from which we can simply walk away when it seems it isn't going our way. At the same time critics of the Bush administration insist it should have done more to combat al Qaeda in Afghanistan before Sept. 11 (on the basis of intelligence far weaker than that pointing to Hussein's weapons of mass destruction), they miss the more profound lesson that national tragedy should have instilled: that the only deterrent to terrorism is strength and that weakness -- real and perceived -- is an incitement to further attacks.
What is weakness? Weakness is when America's leaders compare Iraq to Vietnam, announcing to the world a faltering resolve to see our mission through. To our allies in the Middle East and beyond, these predictions of defeat send a clear and chilling message to hedge their bets, because the United States cannot be counted on. And to our enemies, they send an equally clear message: You can win.
Let there be no doubt: Every time there is a call to abandon Iraq to the United Nations or unnamed "international allies," our enemies know this is a call to cut and run. And they are heartened.
The president's critics cannot have it both ways. They cannot claim to be in favor of winning the war and also oppose fighting it, funding it and offering any coherent strategy for succeeding at it. They cannot credibly claim to be in favor of winning the war while decrying it as a "mistake" that cannot be won.
Iraq is no longer a war of choice, if indeed it ever was. The choice now is between the long, hard slog to victory -- and negotiating terms of surrender.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16300-2004Apr15.html
If Clinton were in office, I'd be speaking up--not a bit of difference! I'm not tied down to a partisan platform. The last thing I'd do is stifle my speech or my opinion. Do you have any idea how people behave when they feel threatened and how readily they give up personal liberty and freedom of speech? How quickly they look for a scapegoat and do horrible things that strip scapegoats of personal freedoms? Do you have any idea how many tyrants have risen to power through fear of an outside threat? How many military coups have relied on the fear of defeat factor? There are signs that this administration has exploited fear and used it to railroad through a war of dubious cause. There's no way on God's green earth that I'd willingly give up one more of my freedoms, either to this lot, whatever its political pursuasion or ANY other lot that followed the same course of action. And as far as referencing Vietnam, if the lessons that were learned there are to be ignored, not only by this administration but by the public too, then many more US lives will be lost. Do get a clue. History is to be learned from, not buried and kept hush hush so no one will remember. This lot in power has done some remarkably stupid things because they didn't seem to learn from the past.
And I used the word jingoistic because it fit--very rah rah. You used the word patriotism which I don't think is quite as apt.
Gettingahandle
Ignorance is Nature's most abundant fuel for decision making.
As far as the comment from Rumsfield, I think it was an unfortunate choice of words, nothing more. He ovbiously meant one thing and the press and Kerry seized it and made it into something else. I'd like to see anybody try to speak in front of hostile press so much without making any mistakes.
And I remember hearing the president make that "bring it on" statement and not having the same reaction to it that you had. Did you actually hear him say it or did you hear about it later in the press? I can't remember thinking that it was inappropriate at the time. In context, it didn't seem the same as it was reported, but that was last year and my memory is vague.
I believe you when you say that you would also oppose war if Clinton were doing the same thing. I would support it if president Clinton had had the courage to do what this president is doing.
As I said before sometimes it is necessary to stifle your own speech for the sake of others. You wouldn't yell fire in a burning building, that would be irresponsible. So, I also believe is yelling "Viet Nam" while our troops are in harm's way.
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