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Caveat Emptor: Political Series Installment 1

I would like to ideally respond each day to one column/blogpost with which I disagree. Here's your first one:

Revisionist History: Antiwar myths about Iraq, debunked.
Peter Wehner, Wall Street Journal Opinion Journal

Myth #1: The president misled Americans to convince them to go to war.
Wehner's response rests on the common talking point that American intelligence agreed with everyone else's intelligence, though it was maybe slightly more alarmist. I'm not going to take issue with that, but the fact remains that he hasn't debunked anything by that statement. The question is one of lying and misleading the public, not the intelligence on which the war was based. Here are some examples of lies by the President:

Straight from the horse's mouth, read the President's letter to Congress justifying action in Iraq links Iraq to 9-11. He did, of course, leave himself a loophole by including the phrase: "international terrorists and terrorist organizations," but the mere presence of the phrase "nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001" in a justification of war in Iraq creates at very least an explicit link . The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found that:

The Intelligence Community has no credible information that Baghdad had foreknowledge of the 11 September attacks or any other al-Qaida strike, but continues to pursue all leads.

p. 322

---

([blocked text]) Two alleged Iraqi connections to the September 11,2001, attacks were reviewed in all the analytical products concerning Iraq’s links to terrorism and al-Qaida. The first connection to the attack involved Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, an Iraqi national, who facilitated the travel of one of the September 11 hijackers to Malaysia in January 2000. [blocked text]
A foreign government service reported that Shakir worked for four months as an airport facilitator in Kuala Lumpur at the end of 1999 and beginning of2000. Shakir claimed he got this job through Ra’ad al-Mudaris, an Iraqi Embassy employee [blocked text] Another source claimed that al-Mudaris was a former IIS officer [blocked text] The CIA judged in Iraqi Support for Terrorism, however, that al-Mudaris’ [blocked text] that the circumstances surrounding the hiring of Shakir for this position did not suggest it was done on behalf of the ITS.
(U) The CIA’S reluctance to draw a conclusion with regard to Shakir was reasonable based on the limited intelligence available and the analysts’ familiaritywith the 11s.
([blocked text])The second alleged Iraqi connection to the September 11 attacks was the widely-publicized report from the Czech government to the US that meetings took place between September 11 hijacker Muhammed Atta and the IIS chief in Prague, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Sarnir al-hi. The CIA judged that other evidence indicated that these meetings likely never occurred.

p.340

Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq

Believe it or not, I didn't even select the most damning portions of the document, only the most relevant. There are, similarly, some tenuous connections in the report, including that al-Qaeda may have trained in Iraq without the government's complicity, but I should hardly think that would be sufficient to link the two organizations.

Then there's evidence that the President wore a public face that stressed seeking peaceful solutions long after he had already decided to go to war: DailyKos covers this one for me.

Myth #2: The Bush administration pressured intelligence agencies to bias their judgments.
This time Wehner relied on that very same report I just quoted in asserting that all CIA analysts interviewed by the Commission denied any pressure from the administration. In general that does seem to be the tone of the document, save that the following is tucked away inside:

The Committee questioned the Ombudsman as to whether the analysts he had interviewed during his investigationhad indicated that they were pressured to change their analysis. He stated that he spoke with approximately 24 individuals with regard to this issue, and “about half a dozen mentioned ‘pressure’ from the Administration; several others did not use that word, but spoke in a context that implied it.” Furthermore, “Only one or two specified the repeated questions, but [he] believe[d] that was ofien the general implication.”

I wouldn't consider that significant enough evidence to support a claim that there was pressure from the administration, except that there's also this well-publicized piece by Paul Pillar, a former CIA analyst. He charges the following: "official intelligence analysis was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized."

The best-known example was the assertion by President George W. Bush in his 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq was purchasing uranium ore in Africa. US intelligence analysts had questioned the credibility of the report making this claim, had kept it out of their own unclassified products, and had advised the White House not to use it publicly. But the administration put the claim into the speech anyway, referring to it as information from British sources in order to make the point without explicitly vouching for the intelligence.

But I'm now doing what Wehner did before, and avoiding answering the question itself. That's pretty easy to do. So did the administration pressure intelligence officers to bias their work? First, a broad statement by Pillar, a preemptive response to Wehner, if you will:

In its report on prewar intelligence concerning Iraqi WMD, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence said it found no evidence that analysts had altered or shaped their judgments in response to political pressure. The Silberman-Robb commission reached the same conclusion, although it conceded that analysts worked in an "environment" affected by "intense" policymaker interest. But the method of investigation used by the panels - essentially, asking analysts whether their arms had been twisted - would have caught only the crudest attempts at politicization. Such attempts are rare and, when they do occur (as with former Undersecretary of State John Bolton's attempts to get the intelligence community to sign on to his judgments about Cuba and Syria), are almost always unsuccessful. Moreover, it is unlikely that analysts would ever acknowledge that their own judgments have been politicized, since that would be far more damning than admitting more mundane types of analytic error.

The actual politicization of intelligence occurs subtly and can take many forms. Context is all-important. Well before March 2003, intelligence analysts and their managers knew that the United States was heading for war with Iraq. It was clear that the Bush administration would frown on or ignore analysis that called into question a decision to go to war and welcome analysis that supported such a decision. Intelligence analysts - for whom attention, especially favorable attention, from policymakers is a measure of success - felt a strong wind consistently blowing in one direction. The desire to bend with such a wind is natural and strong, even if unconscious.

That still souunds a little nebulous, though, but a more specific assertion follows shortly:

But the principal way that the intelligence community's work on Iraq was politicized concerned the specific questions to which the community devoted its energies. As any competent pollster can attest, how a question is framed helps determine the answer. In the case of Iraq, there was also the matter of sheer quantity of output - not just what the intelligence community said, but how many times it said it. On any given subject, the intelligence community faces what is in effect a field of rocks, and it lacks the resources to turn over every one to see what threats to national security may lurk underneath. In an unpoliticized environment, intelligence officers decide which rocks to turn over based on past patterns and their own judgments. But when policymakers repeatedly urge the intelligence community to turn over only certain rocks, the process becomes biased. The community responds by concentrating its resources on those rocks, eventually producing a body of reporting and analysis that, thanks to quantity and emphasis, leaves the impression that what lies under those same rocks is a bigger part of the problem than it really is.

That is what happened when the Bush administration repeatedly called on the intelligence community to uncover more material that would contribute to the case for war. The Bush team approached the community again and again and pushed it to look harder at the supposed Saddam-al Qaeda relationship - calling on analysts not only to turn over additional Iraqi rocks, but also to turn over ones already examined and to scratch the dirt to see if there might be something there after all. The result was an intelligence output that - because the question being investigated was never put in context - obscured rather than enhanced understanding of al Qaeda's actual sources of strength and support.

This process represented a radical departure from the textbook model of the relationship between intelligence and policy, in which an intelligence service responds to policymaker interest in certain subjects (such as "security threats from Iraq" or "al Qaeda's supporters") and explores them in whatever direction the evidence leads. The process did not involve intelligence work designed to find dangers not yet discovered or to inform decisions not yet made. Instead, it involved research to find evidence in support of a specific line of argument - that Saddam was cooperating with al Qaeda - which in turn was being used to justify a specific policy decision.

Still not entirely concrete, but judging by the amount of material blacked out in the Senate Intelligence Committee Report, I find it rather unlikely that specific examples would be permitted. So I'm willing to take Pillar at his word, while Werner isn't. I suppose we can agree to disagree.

Myth #3: Because weapons of mass destruction stockpiles weren't found, Saddam posed no threat.
Werner:

Upon his return from Iraq, weapons inspector David Kay, head of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), told the Senate: "I actually think this may be one of those cases where [Iraq under Saddam Hussein] was even more dangerous than we thought." His statement when issuing the ISG progress report said: "We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities" that were part of "deliberate concealment efforts" that should have been declared to the U.N. And, he concluded, "Saddam, at least as judged by those scientists and other insiders who worked in his military-industrial programs, had not given up his aspirations and intentions to continue to acquire weapons of mass destruction."

Aside from what that actually says about prewar intelligence ("program activities" more dangerous than the actual WMDs we were so certain to find?), this finding actually does indicate that Saddam posed no threat. Yes, it indicates that Saddam might have become a threat, but that's hardly the same thing. Werner seems to acknowledge the weakness of his position by including as an afterthought:

Beyond this, Saddam's regime was one of the most sadistic and aggressive in modern history. It started a war against Iran and used mustard gas and nerve gas. A decade later Iraq invaded Kuwait. Iraq was a massively destabilizing force in the Middle East; so long as Saddam was in power, rivers of blood were sure to follow.

Sweeping rhetoric and perhaps all truthful, but again a non sequitur. The liberal myth Werner claims to be debunking isn't that Saddam was a peaceful, gentle soul who would never hurt a living creature, but that he posed no serious threat to the United States. And he posed no serious threat to the United States.

Myth #4: Promoting democracy in the Middle East is a postwar rationalization.
Ok, this one I'll give him to some extent. I think both liberals and conservatives tend to take this one to extremes. Democratization of Iraq was not just an afterthought, but neither was it a foundational principle of the war, or at least not explicitly so. Werner quotes the President, from before the war:

A liberated Iraq can show the power of freedom to transform that vital region, by bringing hope and progress into the lives of millions. America's interests in security, and America's belief in liberty, both lead in the same direction: to a free and peaceful Iraq. . . . The world has a clear interest in the spread of democratic values, because stable and free nations do not breed the ideologies of murder. They encourage the peaceful pursuit of a better life. And there are hopeful signs of a desire for freedom in the Middle East. . . . A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region.

But Werner fails to acknowledge that in the absense of WMDs and in the absense of any connection between Iraq and 9-11, "promoting democracy" would have been a very flimsy pretext for invasion. And, as it turns out, WMDs and an Iraq-9-11 connection were absent, so a flimsy pretext is what we got.

Response to Werner's Conclusion
"These, then, are the urban legends we must counter, else falsehoods become conventional wisdom. And what a strange world it is: For many antiwar critics, the president is faulted for the war, and he, not the former dictator of Iraq, inspires rage. The liberator rather than the oppressor provokes hatred. It is as if we have stepped through the political looking glass, into a world turned upside down and inside out."

1) These, then, are NOT urban legends nor falsehoods.
2) The President is faulted for the war.
3) The former dictator wasn't the nicest of guys.
4) The liberator might be wise to take heed of Werner's rhetorical looking glass and make sure the reflection doesn't show the oppressor. Policies of torture, of unnamed and nonexistent prisoners in nonexistent prisons, of rendition and of civilian deaths (approximately 40000 as of now) do not a liberator make.

I question the motives of Mr. Werner (deputy assistant to the president and director of the White House's Office of Strategic Initiatives) in writing this piece, and in again doing so as disingenuously as he has. If the President truly has his sights set on liberation and freedom, the promulgation of old lies is not the means to that end. He should let the past recede into the past while, especially while all three branches of government are of a like mindset and do not aim to question that past, and focus on the potential positive effects of his policies.

At the same time, I would not be surprised if an apology or an admission of some failures would engender more support than the President would expect, particularly if accompanied by a serious proclamation that torture by any definition is inappropriate and illegal, that intelligence gathering must become more civilized, and that rule of law requires due process, which means a continued rollback (and eventual elimination) of repressive policies at places like Guantanamo. Not that I have ever supported the Bush administration, but if the President can send America in the right direction, I believe that it is more likely that the international community would follow.

And by the way, judging by the time that took, this won't be daily. You can all breathe sighs of relief.