Conservatives not sure what to do about good news on Iran

[one...two...tree 2,762]

The White House and its political allies have been less than subtle in saber-rattling towards Iran over the last year or so, specifically emphasizing the threat posed by a nuclear-weapons program that doesn’t exist. Yesterday’s conclusions from the National Intelligence Estimate make clear that for attack-Iran-now conservatives, it’s back to the drawing board.

Obviously, as a matter of national security, the NIE revelations are excellent news. But as a political matter, it’s left the right dazed and confused. What do they do with this encouraging information?

As far as I can tell, there are three principal reactions, ranging from merely wrong to you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me wrong.

* The Manchurian CIA: This approach, embraced by Rudy Giuliani’s chief national security advisor Norman Podhoretz, argues that the NIE is not only wrong about the Iranian threat, but is actually part of a massive deception, launched by the Central Intelligence Agency to protect Iran.

“I entertain an even darker suspicion. It is that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again. This time the purpose is to head off the possibility that the President may order air strikes on the Iranian nuclear installations. As the intelligence community must know, if he were to do so, it would be as a last resort, only after it had become undeniable that neither negotiations nor sanctions could prevent Iran from getting the bomb, and only after being convinced that it was very close to succeeding. How better, then, to stop Bush in his tracks than by telling him and the world that such pressures have already been effective and that keeping them up could well bring about “a halt to Iran’s entire nuclear weapons program”—especially if the negotiations and sanctions were combined with a goodly dose of appeasement or, in the NIE’s own euphemistic formulation, ‘with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways.’”

Remember, this guy will not only shape a President Giuliani’s foreign policy, he also boasts “there is very little difference” between how he and the former mayor perceive policy towards Iran.

http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/

[no name 1]

:help:

[Dan J 277]

So, we pay billions every year for an intelligence service that we ignore when the intelligence is contrary to the political objectives. We ignored intelligence on Iraq, and some want to do the same for Iran. So which defense company does this guy own stock in?

[one...two...tree 2,762]

So, we pay billions every year for an intelligence service that we ignore when the intelligence is contrary to the political objectives. We ignored intelligence on Iraq, and some want to do the same for Iran. So which defense company does this guy own stock in?

[GaryC 7]

So, we pay billions every year for an intelligence service that we ignore when the intelligence is contrary to the political objectives. We ignored intelligence on Iraq, and some want to do the same for Iran. So which defense company does this guy own stock in?

This is the same intelligence service that said Saddam had WMD's. Sounds like someone else is believing what they want to believe.

[Dan J 277]

So, we pay billions every year for an intelligence service that we ignore when the intelligence is contrary to the political objectives. We ignored intelligence on Iraq, and some want to do the same for Iran. So which defense company does this guy own stock in?

This is the same intelligence service that said Saddam had WMD's. Sounds like someone else is believing what they want to believe.

Maybe if you call it the Bush and Chaney Neo-conservative Intelligence Services. Evidence disproving that Iraq had WMDs was out well before we got involved in Iraq. But like usual, they just ignored it and went ahead anyway.

[AnewKINDofFEELIN 0]

The guys in the White House are not conservatives...they're republicans. Those two are not interchangable. In fact, today's Republican party is probably no more conservative than the Democrats. That said, I'm voting for the most viable 3rd party candidate on the ballot.

[GaryC 7]

So, we pay billions every year for an intelligence service that we ignore when the intelligence is contrary to the political objectives. We ignored intelligence on Iraq, and some want to do the same for Iran. So which defense company does this guy own stock in?

This is the same intelligence service that said Saddam had WMD's. Sounds like someone else is believing what they want to believe.

Maybe if you call it the Bush and Chaney Neo-conservative Intelligence Services. Evidence disproving that Iraq had WMDs was out well before we got involved in Iraq. But like usual, they just ignored it and went ahead anyway.

Really? It seems that the whole world was saying the same thing. I think your information and the timeline is in error. But I guess the all powerful Bush/Cheney machine was able to rig all the worlds inteligence agencies.

[AnewKINDofFEELIN 0]

Maybe if you call it the Bush and Chaney Neo-conservative Intelligence Services. Evidence disproving that Iraq had WMDs was out well before we got involved in Iraq. But like usual, they just ignored it and went ahead anyway.

Apparently you have classified status or are just spewing the same regurgitated junk as the person before you. Seriously, show me this evidence. Whether you are against the war or not, propogating false information as the truth is dangerous.

[Dan J 277]

The guys in the White House are not conservatives...they're republicans. Those two are not interchangable. In fact, today's Republican party is probably no more conservative than the Democrats. That said, I'm voting for the most viable 3rd party candidate on the ballot.

Neoconservatives are not the same as tradtional conservatives. Traditional conservatives would not be advocating to attack Iran.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism

Traditional conservatism is now more or less represented by the Independents and Democrats to a lesser extent.

[GaryC 7]

So, we pay billions every year for an intelligence service that we ignore when the intelligence is contrary to the political objectives. We ignored intelligence on Iraq, and some want to do the same for Iran. So which defense company does this guy own stock in?

This is the same intelligence service that said Saddam had WMD's. Sounds like someone else is believing what they want to believe.

Maybe if you call it the Bush and Chaney Neo-conservative Intelligence Services. Evidence disproving that Iraq had WMDs was out well before we got involved in Iraq. But like usual, they just ignored it and went ahead anyway.

Just to refresh your memory.

The Intelligence on Iraq's WMD

by Thomas Patrick Carroll

David Kay and his team are not coming up empty-handed in their search for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq. They have uncovered networks of clandestine chemical weapons (CW) and biological weapons (BW) laboratories, proof of systematic concealment and deception, reference strains of BW-related organisms, evidence that Saddam remained intent on acquiring nuclear weapons, and much more. These discoveries notwithstanding, Kay and the Iraq Survey Group have not yet found stocks of chemical or biological weapons. Since WMD played such a big part in the public justification for Operation Iraqi Freedom, fingers are starting to point.

Some (mostly Republicans) are saying the CIA provided lousy intelligence to President Bush and his advisors, leading them to believe the WMD threat from Baghdad was greater than it was - a classic intelligence failure. Others (mostly Democrats) claim that Bush took the intelligence and deliberately exaggerated it, dishonestly manipulating the CIA's judgments in order to rationalize an invasion of Iraq that he and his advisors had already decided upon.

These two accusations both need to be treated with the greatest skepticism.

The National Intelligence Estimate

Much of the talk about an intelligence failure points to statements made in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's WMD, a classified report produced by the CIA and five other members of the Intelligence Community. In July 2003, a declassified version of the NIE's Key Judgments was made public.

In its Key Judgments, the NIE unambiguously declared that there were WMD in Iraq. It said Baghdad possessed between 100 and 500 metric tons of CW, and was producing mustard, sarin, GF (cyclosarin), and VX. The NIE asserted that "all key aspects - R&D, production, and weaponization - of Iraq's offensive BW program are active and [most] elements are larger and more advanced than they were before the [1991] Gulf War."

Of course, most of the 90-page NIE remains classified, and therefore beyond the scope of public commentary. Still, by taking the declassified Key Judgments and combining them with Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs, an unclassified supplementary report that the CIA has also released, we can come to reasonably confident conclusions about just how sound those Key Judgments actually were.

But before we get to the NIE, we need to take note of a fact that hovers over the entire enterprise like a dark cloud. The analysts who wrote the NIE had almost no recent human intelligence (HUMINT) to draw on. This was not surprising, as Saddam's security services spent the past decade killing every CIA agent they could find, leaving our Clandestine Service with few, if any, well-placed spies in the Baghdad government. About a year ago the Agency evidently started rebuilding its web of Iraqi agents, but twelve months is not enough time to spot, develop, and recruit anything like an adequate agent network, especially in a totalitarian state like Saddam's Iraq.

This HUMINT gap is actually implied in the NIE itself. In the section entitled Confidence Levels for Selected Key Judgments in this Estimate, three judgments are listed about which the NIE claims to have the lowest confidence - i.e., when Saddam would use WMD; whether Saddam would clandestinely attack the U.S. mainland; and whether Saddam might share WMD with al-Qa'ida. Notice that all three have to do with plans and intentions, two subjects on which only human spies can effectively report.

To make up for the dearth of agent reporting, the CIA seems to have fallen back on three other categories of information in its preparation of the NIE:

Analysts relied heavily on historical information. This ranged from discoveries of Iraqi nuclear programs shortly after the end of the Gulf War, to data on the use of CW against Kurds and Iranians in the 1980s, to the reams of material produced by the UN inspection regime over the years. Although dated, this was important documentation on what Saddam Hussein was willing to do and capable of attaining. Saddam's continuing desire to possess WMD was never in doubt, and who could say (without good HUMINT sources) that his capabilities were adequately blunted?

Analysts made extensive use of negative inference - i.e., when Saddam refused to prove something was not the case, the inference was drawn that it possibly (sometimes probably) was the case. And there was a lot of this kind of information. Many times Baghdad refused to account for gaps and inconsistencies in its WMD declarations, or never provided proof that it completely destroyed the weapons and production infrastructure it said it had. The Iraqis withheld important details on their nuclear program, never documented the 6,000 missing CW bombs from the Iran/Iraq war, never explained what happened to thousands of tons of chemical precursors, and much more. If all was actually as Baghdad claimed, why then the refusal to prove it? To this day, the most plausible explanation for this ultimately self-destructive behavior remains that the Iraqis were lying.

Finally, analysts drew on national technical means (NTM), such as satellite photographs. They looked at rocket test facilities where buildings were going up, chemical plants with suspicious new additions, and the like. Although overhead photographs tell analysts nothing about plans and intentions, they provide incontrovertible evidence that something is going on. And when that 'something' involves a dual-use chemical production facility in a rogue state like Iraq, it is logical to suspect (if not assume) the worst.

When all these sources were pulled together and the analysis was written, the result was a realistic, responsible National Intelligence Estimate. No effort was made to present the sources as being stronger than they were. Old material, for example, was labeled as such, and when inferences were drawn from Iraq's refusal to answer questions, this too was clearly identified. No sophisticated policy maker, in the White House or anywhere else, can plausibly claim to have been misled.

On the other hand, the Key Judgments were undeniably strong. Honest critics might legitimately question whether the triad of historical data, negative inference, and NTM was robust enough to support such confident conclusions. But supporters of the Key Judgments can make the opposite case, and do so at least as persuasively as the critics. For in the final analysis, however lacking in HUMINT corroboration the Estimate may be, the data it cites is voluminous and accurate.

The White House and the NIE

So the NIE was a credible document. But did White House officials illegitimately exploit intelligence to further a veiled agenda, as some of the President's detractors are claiming? Their public statements on the likelihood that Iraq had WMD, however confident, do not appear to have gone beyond the available intelligence estimates. More complex is the question of whether the Administration used WMD as an excuse for pursuing 'hidden' ends.

Although WMD concerns were certainly the centerpiece of Bush's public campaign to gain support for Operation Iraqi Freedom, they were only part of a much larger strategy about which the President and his advisors have been remarkably candid. In the important National Security Strategy series and collateral statements (like the President's June 2002 speech at West Point), the Administration laid out the need for power projection, regime change, preemption (preferably with allies, alone when necessary), the application of political and military pressure in the Middle East, and other elements of America's strategy for combating terror.

The eradication of WMD was always an important part of the Administration's strategy, but it was (and is) far from being the whole. And this fact was never hidden, although the WMD piece was publicly much more prominent than were the larger, strategic elements. This was hardly surprising, since the Administration was trying to give potential allies (e.g., Germany, France) something they could endorse, and the destruction of Iraqi WMD was a far easier goal for the Europeans to support than a proposal for sheer US power projection would have been.

Still, the decision to be relatively coy about the strategic goals of Operation Iraqi Freedom carried a risk: If WMD were not found, there would be some explaining to do. When the decision to emphasize WMD was made, this risk seemed relatively low. It retrospect, it was not.

http://www.meib.org/articles/0311_iraq1.htm

[AnewKINDofFEELIN 0]

The guys in the White House are not conservatives...they're republicans. Those two are not interchangable. In fact, today's Republican party is probably no more conservative than the Democrats. That said, I'm voting for the most viable 3rd party candidate on the ballot.

Neoconservatives are not the same as tradtional conservatives. Traditional conservatives would not be advocating to attack Iran.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism

Traditional conservatism is now more or less represented by the Independents and Democrats to a lesser extent.

You'll know when I'm talking to you. The original post called Bush and Cheney conservatives.

[Dan J 277]

So, we pay billions every year for an intelligence service that we ignore when the intelligence is contrary to the political objectives. We ignored intelligence on Iraq, and some want to do the same for Iran. So which defense company does this guy own stock in?

This is the same intelligence service that said Saddam had WMD's. Sounds like someone else is believing what they want to believe.

Maybe if you call it the Bush and Chaney Neo-conservative Intelligence Services. Evidence disproving that Iraq had WMDs was out well before we got involved in Iraq. But like usual, they just ignored it and went ahead anyway.

Just to refresh your memory.

The Intelligence on Iraq's WMD

by Thomas Patrick Carroll

David Kay and his team are not coming up empty-handed in their search for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq. They have uncovered networks of clandestine chemical weapons (CW) and biological weapons (BW) laboratories, proof of systematic concealment and deception, reference strains of BW-related organisms, evidence that Saddam remained intent on acquiring nuclear weapons, and much more. These discoveries notwithstanding, Kay and the Iraq Survey Group have not yet found stocks of chemical or biological weapons. Since WMD played such a big part in the public justification for Operation Iraqi Freedom, fingers are starting to point.

Some (mostly Republicans) are saying the CIA provided lousy intelligence to President Bush and his advisors, leading them to believe the WMD threat from Baghdad was greater than it was - a classic intelligence failure. Others (mostly Democrats) claim that Bush took the intelligence and deliberately exaggerated it, dishonestly manipulating the CIA's judgments in order to rationalize an invasion of Iraq that he and his advisors had already decided upon.

These two accusations both need to be treated with the greatest skepticism.

The National Intelligence Estimate

Much of the talk about an intelligence failure points to statements made in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's WMD, a classified report produced by the CIA and five other members of the Intelligence Community. In July 2003, a declassified version of the NIE's Key Judgments was made public.

In its Key Judgments, the NIE unambiguously declared that there were WMD in Iraq. It said Baghdad possessed between 100 and 500 metric tons of CW, and was producing mustard, sarin, GF (cyclosarin), and VX. The NIE asserted that "all key aspects - R&D, production, and weaponization - of Iraq's offensive BW program are active and [most] elements are larger and more advanced than they were before the [1991] Gulf War."

Of course, most of the 90-page NIE remains classified, and therefore beyond the scope of public commentary. Still, by taking the declassified Key Judgments and combining them with Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs, an unclassified supplementary report that the CIA has also released, we can come to reasonably confident conclusions about just how sound those Key Judgments actually were.

But before we get to the NIE, we need to take note of a fact that hovers over the entire enterprise like a dark cloud. The analysts who wrote the NIE had almost no recent human intelligence (HUMINT) to draw on. This was not surprising, as Saddam's security services spent the past decade killing every CIA agent they could find, leaving our Clandestine Service with few, if any, well-placed spies in the Baghdad government. About a year ago the Agency evidently started rebuilding its web of Iraqi agents, but twelve months is not enough time to spot, develop, and recruit anything like an adequate agent network, especially in a totalitarian state like Saddam's Iraq.

This HUMINT gap is actually implied in the NIE itself. In the section entitled Confidence Levels for Selected Key Judgments in this Estimate, three judgments are listed about which the NIE claims to have the lowest confidence - i.e., when Saddam would use WMD; whether Saddam would clandestinely attack the U.S. mainland; and whether Saddam might share WMD with al-Qa'ida. Notice that all three have to do with plans and intentions, two subjects on which only human spies can effectively report.

To make up for the dearth of agent reporting, the CIA seems to have fallen back on three other categories of information in its preparation of the NIE:

Analysts relied heavily on historical information. This ranged from discoveries of Iraqi nuclear programs shortly after the end of the Gulf War, to data on the use of CW against Kurds and Iranians in the 1980s, to the reams of material produced by the UN inspection regime over the years. Although dated, this was important documentation on what Saddam Hussein was willing to do and capable of attaining. Saddam's continuing desire to possess WMD was never in doubt, and who could say (without good HUMINT sources) that his capabilities were adequately blunted?

Analysts made extensive use of negative inference - i.e., when Saddam refused to prove something was not the case, the inference was drawn that it possibly (sometimes probably) was the case. And there was a lot of this kind of information. Many times Baghdad refused to account for gaps and inconsistencies in its WMD declarations, or never provided proof that it completely destroyed the weapons and production infrastructure it said it had. The Iraqis withheld important details on their nuclear program, never documented the 6,000 missing CW bombs from the Iran/Iraq war, never explained what happened to thousands of tons of chemical precursors, and much more. If all was actually as Baghdad claimed, why then the refusal to prove it? To this day, the most plausible explanation for this ultimately self-destructive behavior remains that the Iraqis were lying.

Finally, analysts drew on national technical means (NTM), such as satellite photographs. They looked at rocket test facilities where buildings were going up, chemical plants with suspicious new additions, and the like. Although overhead photographs tell analysts nothing about plans and intentions, they provide incontrovertible evidence that something is going on. And when that 'something' involves a dual-use chemical production facility in a rogue state like Iraq, it is logical to suspect (if not assume) the worst.

When all these sources were pulled together and the analysis was written, the result was a realistic, responsible National Intelligence Estimate. No effort was made to present the sources as being stronger than they were. Old material, for example, was labeled as such, and when inferences were drawn from Iraq's refusal to answer questions, this too was clearly identified. No sophisticated policy maker, in the White House or anywhere else, can plausibly claim to have been misled.

On the other hand, the Key Judgments were undeniably strong. Honest critics might legitimately question whether the triad of historical data, negative inference, and NTM was robust enough to support such confident conclusions. But supporters of the Key Judgments can make the opposite case, and do so at least as persuasively as the critics. For in the final analysis, however lacking in HUMINT corroboration the Estimate may be, the data it cites is voluminous and accurate.

The White House and the NIE

So the NIE was a credible document. But did White House officials illegitimately exploit intelligence to further a veiled agenda, as some of the President's detractors are claiming? Their public statements on the likelihood that Iraq had WMD, however confident, do not appear to have gone beyond the available intelligence estimates. More complex is the question of whether the Administration used WMD as an excuse for pursuing 'hidden' ends.

Although WMD concerns were certainly the centerpiece of Bush's public campaign to gain support for Operation Iraqi Freedom, they were only part of a much larger strategy about which the President and his advisors have been remarkably candid. In the important National Security Strategy series and collateral statements (like the President's June 2002 speech at West Point), the Administration laid out the need for power projection, regime change, preemption (preferably with allies, alone when necessary), the application of political and military pressure in the Middle East, and other elements of America's strategy for combating terror.

The eradication of WMD was always an important part of the Administration's strategy, but it was (and is) far from being the whole. And this fact was never hidden, although the WMD piece was publicly much more prominent than were the larger, strategic elements. This was hardly surprising, since the Administration was trying to give potential allies (e.g., Germany, France) something they could endorse, and the destruction of Iraqi WMD was a far easier goal for the Europeans to support than a proposal for sheer US power projection would have been.

Still, the decision to be relatively coy about the strategic goals of Operation Iraqi Freedom carried a risk: If WMD were not found, there would be some explaining to do. When the decision to emphasize WMD was made, this risk seemed relatively low. It retrospect, it was not.

http://www.meib.org/articles/0311_iraq1.htm

Can you post an article for someone who isn't so biased? http://www.tpcarroll.com/index.htm

Carroll Associates draws on first-hand experience in espionage, intelligence, counterterrorism, and global affairs. Every solution is tailored to your needs, from a one-time educational lecture to ongoing consultations.

* Radical Islam: A strategy to cope with Al Qaeda and its fundamentalist allies is key to safe operations in today's world. Carroll Associates will elucidate the historical roots and contemporary manifestations of Islamic extremism, and work with you on ways to respond.

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This guy has a vested interest in keeping people believing that the Muslims are out the get them. After all, thats what he makes his money on.

[GaryC 7]

Can you post an article for someone who isn't so biased?

There wasn't anything biased about what I posted. It was the way things were at that time. Your bias will not let you accept the truth that all available inteligence at the time said Iraq had WMD's. Most of your dem friends including Clinton thought the same thing.

Edited December 4, 2007 by GaryC

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Well bad news that undermined Bush's preconceived policy didn't stop or delay the movement into Iraq, once it appeared that Saddam was being compliant - if anything it speeded up the process.

As to intelligence - my understanding is not that intelligence was specifically ignored in Iraq, but that it was carefully selected and fixed around an already preconceived policy. There is a statement by the former head of MI6 to that effect in the Downing Street memo, not to mention the political wranglings at the time at home in the UK. Tony Blair had an extremely hard time convincing the public that the war was in response to the "clear and present threat" identified by the Bush administration. It became increasingly clear - that the whole thing was being stage-managed and the corroborative evidence in support of the government's position was very thin on the ground. Blair's credibility as PM never recovered from that.