Just the Facts, Ma'am
By Brian Duffy
Posted 2/25/07
The dark art of intelligence, never far from the surface in our post-9/11 world, is once again front and center, only not exactly in the way President Bush might have wished. After several weeks of on-again, off-again promises of a top-secret briefing on the alleged role of Iranian agents in the nightmarish violence of Iraq, U.S. military officials finally decided to deliver the goods in a secret briefing to reporters in Baghdad-and promptly stubbed their toe. The charge of Iranian meddling in Iraq is a grave one and needs to be dealt with seriously. But given the Bush administration's dismal record in the intelligence arena, the Baghdad briefing was handled in the worst way possible. No cameras or tape recorders were allowed. The identity of the intelligence analyst who led the briefing was not disclosed. And despite weeks of careful vetting by intelligence and military officials back in Washington, the briefing ran disastrously off message. This is all the more sad for the fact that there was, at the heart of the briefing, what appeared to be some very credible evidence to support the allegations against Iran.
One of the few salutary things about military conflict is that in bringing soldiers face to face with the enemy, it affords the opportunity of collecting courtroom-quality evidence that is the intelligence equivalent of the Holy Grail. That seems to have been the case here. The reporters in Baghdad were shown physical evidence-materiel, serial numbers, and the like-indicating that Iranian agents were shipping a highly lethal new roadside bomb into Iraq. More damningly, intelligence officials concluded that the agents were members of an elite cadre called the Quds force, a unit of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Force, which reports directly to Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. That's about as good as intelligence work gets. But then the briefer blew his case sky-high with this statement: "So the activities that the ... Quds force are conducting in Iraq, we assess, are coming from the highest levels of the Iranian government."
Iraq syndrome. It took the Pentagon's highest-ranking soldier, Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to flatly refute the unsupported "highest levels" statement. Then President Bush finally got around to doing the same thing. "We don't know ... whether the head leaders of Iran ordered" it, he conceded.
For all the predictable-and, evidently, unfounded-criticism about the Bush administration's trying to make a case for attacking Iran, much as it made its flawed case for attacking Iraq, there is more at stake here than politics as usual, and perhaps President Bush's forthright rejection of the "highest leaders" charge was a tentative first step toward acknowledging it. Yes, the alleged parallels between Iraq and Vietnam have been badly overdrawn. But there is one fitting comparison whose implications the Bush administration-and perhaps succeeding administrations-will have to learn to live with. The lies and self-delusional scenarios our military and political leaders indulged themselves in during the Vietnam War created a long hangover effect called the Vietnam syndrome. As a result of the many misapprehensions and misstatements made before the invasion of Iraq and in its mismanaged aftermath, we are now beset by something that can only be called the Iraq syndrome. Its symptoms may be seen not just in the cynicism of so many Americans, as reflected in the opinion polls, but also in the reflexive rejection of American pronouncements by friends and allies even, as was the case with the unfortunate Baghdad briefing, when they are tenanted upon hard, credible evidence.
In the global war on terrorism, no tool will be more critical to American success than good intelligence. This administration, however, has done much to render that tool almost unfit for use. The tawdry disclosures from the perjury trial of Vice President Cheney's former aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and the scathing Pentagon report against former Rumsfeld aide Douglas Feith show an administration dangerously cavalier about the credibility of its most critical intelligence and seemingly unconcerned about employing it in an overtly political context.
Vice President Cheney may feel as if the prewar intelligence failures on Iraq have been dealt with by simply hanging the issue around the neck of George "Slam Dunk" Tenet, the former director of central intelligence. And President Bush may sleep easier at night, having finally acceded to the demands that he create a new Director of National Intelligence office to fix the problems exposed by both Iraq and the 9/11 attacks. The jury on the latter is still out, but the implications of the Iraq syndrome are so pernicious that, for a long time to come, much greater care will have to be taken in the collection, analysis, and portrayal of American intelligence information. Credibility takes a long time to build, but it can be lost in just an instant.
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/opinion/articles/070225/5edit.htm
