There’s a bigger point that’s easy to miss in this larger brouhaha over the Niger documents — one which the attention to the Niger documents themselves may even help obscure.
A few days ago I mentioned an October 20th column by Jim Hoagland, one in which he celebrated the way the Bush administration had muscled the intelligence community (and particularly the CIA) into giving up its “long-standing and deeply flawed analysis of Iraq.” The White House was triggering, he went on to say, a battle between “officials whose careers and reputations were built on the old analysis of the Iraqis as a feckless, inert and inward-looking bunch of thugs against those willing to take a fresh, untilted look at all the evidence.”
The idea was clear. The CIA didn’t understand Saddam, his motives, the extent of his WMD programs or the depth of its ties to al Qaida. (The CIA, Hoagland lamented, still couldn’t bring itself to agree about Iraq’s alleged deep ties with al Qaida.) The politicals did — and they were going to make sure the folks at the Agency did too.
The results, Hoagland continued, had been promising. It was only because the administration had forced the CIA to get religion on Iraq that they had generated a National Intelligence Estimate that allowed the president to fill his speech with details of Iraq-al-Qaida connections and chemical and biological-spewing unmanned aerial vehicles. As Hoagland aptly put it on July 16th, the “political leadership of the administration declared war on the careerists at the CIA soon after Bush’s election.”
Now, sometimes bureaucracies really do need to be taken on, to be shaken up. But we have intelligence agencies for a reason: to gather and analyze intelligence. Going to war with your primary intelligence agency is a risky proposition, especially while you’re fighting a war against international terrorist groups.
Until we got into Iraq we really couldn’t say for certain what we’d find. Perhaps the politicals were right and the Agency’s more cautious estimations of the Iraqi threat would be exposed as hopelessly naive.
But now we’re there. And from what we’ve found so far, the Bush administration’s revisionist view of Iraq seems far more deeply flawed than what Hoagland called the Agency’s “long-standing and deeply flawed analysis of Iraq.”
Now we’re also seeing a lot of administration defenders carting out the standard lines that intelligence is an art, not a science, that it’s a mosaic, and so forth.
That’s all true of course. But it doesn’t cut it to say, “This is just an intelligence failure. The White House just went with what they were being told.” Why? Because you can’t separate our failure to find a lot of what we thought we’d find in Iraq from the “war” the administration has been fighting with the intelligence community for the last two years. If the administration spent the previous two years “at war” with the CIA, pushing them harder and harder into a set of assumptions (and in many cases conclusions) that turned out to be wildly off-the-mark, shouldn’t there be some political accountability for what turned out to be at best a very poor call?
Let’s say a CEO took over a Fortune 500 company. Let’s further say that his first act was to walk down to the advertising division and tell them they had no idea what they were doing and had to change the way they did business. He also told them he was going to bring in some outside consultants to comment on (read: second guess) their work. Now, the CEO and his new crew didn’t have a huge amount of experience with ad work. But he talked a good game. So people thought he might have something up his sleeve. Then the new results come in at the end of the year and the company’s revenues fell off the cliff.
Now, needless to say, the boss’s cronies and sycophants would say that it was just an example of how bad the ad division was doing in the first place, or come up with some other such excuse. But how long do you think that CEO would hold on to his job?
