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COMMENTARY
July 10, 2004
Groupthink
The speed at which the media can spin a story could be clocked yesterday. It took less than five minutes -- from the release of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on pre-war Iraqi intelligence assessments at 10:30 eastern time -- for most major media outlets to analyse the document on their websites. The report is more than 500 pages and the distillation of a year's worth of intrusive inquiry into the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies. The media emphasize the conclusion of the report but this was circular. An inquiry to establish why something failed will generally conclude that it failed. It had been clear within a few weeks of the American conquest of Iraq that the CIA's absurdly detailed assessment of Saddam Hussein's nuclear biological and chemical capabilities were nonsense. It did not follow that Saddam had had none: only that neither the CIA nor any other Western intelligence agency had a clue what they were. Just as they now have no clue where they went. (That they once existed is established beyond controversy.) The interesting question was instead: How did they get it so wrong? And after a few hours of reading and skimming the report myself I can't really say that it contains any answer besides the systematic incompetence that is the signature of almost any large bureaucratic operation. At every point on every question so-called intelligence agents showed themselves to be poorly trained jealous of territory cowardly about collecting information lazy in filing it clich?-ridden in their interpretation of it bereft of logic or candour and very poorly managed. The report contains a few memorably caustic comments on the "groupthink" of the intelligence community -- hardly a revelation. Yet the report itself is an exercise in groupthink. The Senators do not look long or hard at their own contribution to the debacle. They hobbled the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community with bureaucratic restrictions to field work and inter-agency co-operation through the decades after Watergate and the Vietnam War. They thus got the result they should have expected. That the CIA had not even one undercover agent in Iraq for many years prior to the invasion tells most of the story. But this is not fleshed out. It is not put together with for instance the agencies' abject dependence on translators and "experts" whose motives for helping are thoroughly opaque. And the culture of "political correctness" reinforced by bureaucracy in a million little ways prevents even the imaginative from thinking their way under the enemy's skin. On the other hand it is worth mentioning that for all its limitations the CIA and others got a few things right. They were for instance almost precisely right about Iraq's missile capabilities and about the extent of Saddam's human rights abuses. Had the Senators asked the out-of-the-box question -- How did they get anything right? -- they might have cast more light on the errors. Or: Why did intelligence overestimate Iraq's capabilities this time when it has a long track record of underestimating threats everywhere else? This is important because hard cases make bad law and it would be extremely foolish for lawmakers to add any more pressure on intelligence agencies to conceal their suspicions in future. The report doesn't offer any proposals to make things better only a few predictable hints plus one not so predictable. This is the hint that more budget would not do the CIA any good. A bold analyst might go further and say that endemic overfunding is at the root of most intelligence failures. We have a detailed exposition of what information was available when and how it was interpreted; one which is likely to date quickly as still more information emerges. There are no allegations of anything like political pressure to cook a result. There is plenty of evidence of the opposite: of policy being driven by intelligence alarms. But again the CIA's job is to be alarming. That the U.S. military was along with the President Congress and everyone else misled by intelligence is proven in fact. The military would hardly have deployed vast quantities of incredibly expensive cumbersome special gear along the front line of their invasion had they not believed the WMD threats to be real. Stupidity is an entirely sufficient explanation for most of the mistakes that were made; and what the CIA did more than any other agency was help to make the military stupid. This cost lives and huge amounts of money: for as we now realize Saddam's regime could have been knocked over even better and faster than it was leaving more resources for the apr?s-guerre. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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