“The Surge’s Misleading Success”

The New Republic 26 June 2008

While doubts about the wisdom of hiring a group of rag-tag Sunni militias–the so-called “Iraqi Awakening” or “Sons of Iraq“–to do our dirty work in combating al-Qaida in Iraq have long been common fare of skeptics of the surge, a new report just released by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), “Securing, Stabilizing, and Rebuilding Iraq,” gives official weight to these concerns. One of the first governmental reports to express ambivalence about the long-term commitment of these Sunni militias to U.S. goals in Iraq, it emphasizes normalization of the groups into mainstream Iraqi political and security bodies is proceeding at a snail’s-pace. Jobless, disenfranchised, and armed to the teeth, the “Awakening” militias could quickly become a nightmare for the Maliki government–and for our hopes to stabilize Iraq–if steps towards their incorporation into the Iraqi state are not promptly taken. Indeed, while critics have long worried that these groups could turn against coalition and Iraqi forces, the report suggests that this could already be happening:

Despite their relative success and growing numbers, during early 2008 some tribal security forces temporarily withdrew their support of [coalition forces] and the Iraqi security forces in Diyala and Babil provinces. Fraying relations between these groups and the Iraqi government in Anbar province caused a spike in violence in this area.

Even more worrisome, the GAO points out that our current “New Way Forward” strategy lacks a “cohesive plan” for how to forestall this meltdown. Until we come up with a blueprint for how to facilitate the transition of these groups from vigilante militias into committed partners in the Iraqi state, the report soberly suggests, our recent progress on security in Iraq–which has been afforded in great part by their cooperation–may be only short-lived.

“Climb Aboard The Bush Bus!”

The New Republic 25 June 2008

Walking past the AFL-CIO building on the way to work yesterday, I couldn’t help but notice a gaggle of union-supporters and other passers-by crowded around a massive tour bus plastered with pictures of President Bush. Organized by Americans United for Change (AUC), the “Bush Legacy Bus” turned out to be an enormous bio-fuel-powered mobile museum set to tour the country for the next several months and showcase an exhibit on the missteps and abuses of the Bush administration. The 45-foot, 28-ton glorified rock n’ roll tour-bus, I was told by press-secretary Julie Blust, would be road-tripping to 150 cities throughout the country, setting up shop mostly outside of Republican congressional offices, in order to remind Americans just how far the administration has taken the country off course (as if, with the president’s approval rating at 29 percent, this were necessary).

I was encouraged by a pimply teenage supporter to hop on the bus and take an “interactive tour” through the administration’s worst moments. At the back of the vehicle, a faux gasoline pump emblazoned with the emblem “G.O.P.–Grand Oil Party” stood nearby a glass display-case containing the Gortex boots and dog-tags of slain soldier Patrick McCaffrey. On the opposing wall, “The 3 R’s of No Child Left Behind: Rhetoric, Retreat, Renege” was scrawled in remedial handwriting. From another side, maudlin piano music (clashing mightily with the bus’s arena-rock aesthetic) wafted from a video-screen showing harrowed Katrina survivors in the Superdome.

According to AUC President Brad Woodhouse, the “Bush Bus” was actually the AUC’s best idea for how to ensure that the administration would not quietly fade into history in its twilight months. Among other projects considered were a “Worst President Ever” statue in Crawford, Texas, a “Bush is a Bust” museum in Houston, and a miniature golf-course in Waco dedicated to the administration’s fiascos. (The landmarks would have made a nice complement to plans for the George W. Bush Sewage Plant in San Francisco.)

Why did the “Bush Bus” ultimately win? According to Blust, the museum-on-wheels would be seen by many more than a stationary exhibit and, as she put it, would prove quite the spectacle. Can’t argue with that: Perhaps only the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile could strike a larger profile cruising down the highway than the red-white-and-blue caravan, its exterior plastered with colossal images of Bush and a list of his greatest offences in large letters–”foreclosures, record gas prices, global warming, eavesdropping…”

I asked Blust if the “Legacy Tour” project was intended to emulate the great rock n’ roll bus odysseys of yore (perhaps pegged to the Grateful Dead’s recent endorsement of Obama). “It’s not really a rock n’ roll tour,” she said, a bit flustered. “[But] we’ll try to do as many drugs as possible. Wreck some hotel rooms.”

“Intelligence Failure: The Postwar Pipedream”

The New Republic 18 June 2008

Perhaps the most damning conclusion of the committee’s report on prewar intelligence is that the Bush administration failed to take into account CIA and DIA suggestions that post-invasion Iraq would require a significant long-term U.S. troop presence to quell violent Baathist attempts to return to power, al-Qaida-related terrorist activity, and inter-ethnic/tribal violence. Though this is not the first time such ineptitude has been reported, the committee provides a particularly searing indictment of the administration’s post-invasion planning.

On this score, the committee’s findings are largely a reiteration of the conclusions of its 2007 report dedicated exclusively to exploring the discrepancies between the administration’s postwar pipe dreams and the realistic assessments of the country’s intelligence agencies. According to both reports, “Statements by President Bush and Vice President Cheney regarding the postwar situation in Iraq, in terms of political, security, and economic, did not reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products.”

Exhibit A: While Cheney in 2002 explicitly agreed with “Middle East expert Professor Fouad Ajami” that “after liberation, the streets in Basra and Baghdad are ’sure to erupt in joy,’” contemporaneous DIA intelligence estimates held that most Iraqis would treat the “liberators” with “ambivalence,” and that “significant force protection threats will emerge from the Baathists, the Jihadists and Arab nationalists who oppose any US occupation of Iraq.”

Exhibit B: While Bush preached that Iraq’s people would soon be able to “share in the progress and prosperity of our time,” a 2002 CIA study suggested that “Iraq currently appears to lack both the socio-economic and politico-cultural prerequisites that political scientists generally regard as necessary to nurture democracy.” Furthermore, as the report details, the possibility of establishing a stable Iraqi democracy in the aftermath of invasion was predicted by the intelligence community “to be a long, difficult and probably turbulent challenge.”

Unfortunately, the report does not take into account the “many other sources of information available to policymakers that would inform their views about post-war Iraq”–i.e., the Ajamis and Chalabis whose utopian post-invasion visions had captured the ear of the administration. The report does seem to imply, however, that it was the concerns of these “other sources,” and not those of sober and nuanced intelligence estimates, that ultimately dictated how the administration envisioned the future of Iraq.

“Intelligence Failure: Bush’s ‘Selective Interpretations’”

The New Republic 17 June 2008

In glancing through the 170 pages of the report “Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information,” one cannot help but be struck by a certain mad logic to the administration’s interpretations of prewar intelligence findings. Without conclusive evidence that Iraq had restarted nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs, and that it had the wherewithal to deliver these weapons to the U.S. or to distribute them to al-Qaida and its fellow-travelers, the administration focused on certain minute, dubious details of intelligence findings that would simultaneously give evidence of major Iraqi WMD programs and explain why the existence of these programs had been so difficult to establish with certainty in the first place.

For instance, the report makes clear just how crucial the existence of the supposed “mobile biological weapons laboratories” was to proving that Iraq had restarted its biological weapons program since the conclusion of the First Gulf War. The fact that these mobile bio-weapons labs could be easily moved throughout the country and hidden within “palm and date tree groves” provided the perfect explanation why there had been little direct observation of the supposed bio-weapons program since 1991. Of course, our knowledge of these mythical mobile-labs was tenuous at best, provided by only a handful of informants (one of whom was the famous “Curveball”), and post-war investigations proved that they had, in fact, never existed.

The same was true of the case for Iraq’s supposed chemical weapons program: Since intelligence could not determine conclusively whether Iraq had restarted such a program in earnest since 1991, the Bush administration based its case on scattered reports that Saddam had surreptitiously embedded his chemical weapons program into civilian chemical industries. Again, absent the existence of these dual-use chemical plants whose activities would evade outside detection, conclusively proving that Iraq had restarted a serious chemical weapons program would have been significantly more difficult. And again, the intelligence was proven wrong.

The most maddening instance of this selective interpretation of intelligence came in the administration’s attempts to argue that Iraq had both the capability and intent to use its WMDs against targets in the continental United States. Given very little evidence that this was true, the White House focused on limited and contradictory intelligence suggesting that Iraq was outfitting unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with equipment for a chemical or biological attack. And when it was discovered that Iraq had attempted to purchase navigational equipment for its UAVs that contained maps of the 50 American states, it was reported that Hussein could be planning a major attack. According to prewar Air Force and DIA assessments, however, the UAVs were likely intended only for reconnaissance and the navigational software for “generic mapping” purposes. But again, when consideration of the full-range of evidence did not reveal any conclusive facts about Iraqi capabilities and intentions, the mere possibility of the existence of these retrofitted UAVs–as with the supposed mobile bio-weapons labs and dual-use chemical factories–was taken as indication that Iraq did, in fact, pose a clear and present danger.

While perhaps the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report does not reveal any shockingly new conclusions about the Bush administration’s manipulation of prewar Iraq intelligence, at the very least it affords one the opportunity to revisit these tragicomic intelligence debates, and to consider again how tenuous the administration’s interpretations of the available evidence on Iraqi weapons technology truly was.

“Intelligence Failure: Inside This Month’s Senate Report”

The New Republic 16 June 2008

The Senate intelligence committee released its two-part report this month exploring pre-war intelligence on Iraq and its use by the Bush administration. We asked James Martin, a Paul Mellon fellow at Cambridge University who writes on international security issues, to wade through the 172-page report for us. He’ll be guest-posting his findings here over the next few days.

Released only three days after the publication earlier this month of Scott McClellan’s damning indictment of the Bush administration, What Happened, new reports by the Senate Intelligence Committee on prewar Iraq intelligence seem to confirm the conclusions of the former press-secretary’s mea culpa: that the administration misused and misrepresented the findings of the intelligence community in the run-up to the war.

The findings of the first report, aptly named “Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information,” strikes one now as rather anti-climatic–its conclusions having long since become common knowledge: “In the push to rally public support for the invasion of Iraq,” writes committee chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), “Administration officials often failed to accurately portray what was known, what was not known, and what was suspected about Iraq and the threat it represented to our national security.”

But while its conclusions are perhaps not breaking-news, the committee’s report is arguably the clearest and most direct presentation to date of the disconnect between what was known by the intelligence community in the run-up to the war and what was claimed to be true by the administration. On the question of Iraq’s nuclear weapons capability, for example, the report analyzes in detail the White House’s willful disregard of the conclusions of the Department of Energy and the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research that the aluminum tubes claimed by the CIA to be part of Iraq’s supposed uranium enrichment apparatus were in fact being used for the purposes of a conventional rocket program–a point that was confirmed by the postwar findings of the Iraq Survey Group. And when confronted with CIA and DIA assessments that a purported meeting between Mohammad Atta and Iraqi intelligence officials in 2001 could not be confirmed, the administration continued to insist that such a meeting had taken place and that it proved high-level cooperation between Iraq and al-Qaida.

On the other hand, the report describes numerous instances of agreement between the intelligence community and the White House on the status of Iraq’s WMD program and Saddam’s ties to terrorism. On the question of Iraq’s biological weapons programs, for instance, the report argues that the administration’s public declarations were “substantiated” by available intelligence information. And, the report claims, the White House was on sure-footing in arguing for official Iraqi tolerance of the presence of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other al-Qaida-related terrorists within Iraq prior to the invasion.

The impassioned minority views of some of the committee’s dissenting Republican members–Senators Kit Bond, Saxby Chambliss, Orrin Hatch, and Richard Burr–focus on these areas of agreement, and argue that charges of dissimulation on the part of the administration are weakened by the fact that prominent Democratic members of Congress relied upon the same intelligence information in drumming up support for the war. If the White House was lying, they claim, then what were Kerry, Edwards, and Clinton doing?

But as Dan Froomkin at the WashPost points out, the fact that Congress “bought the administration line” does not necessarily mean that the two were operating on a level playing field: “It takes a lot of chutzpah to defend yourself against charges that you’ve engaged in a propaganda campaign,” he writes, “by noting that it worked.”

It’s likely that the administration had access to more intelligence on Iraq than Congress, as Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has recently argued, although the extent of its knowledge remains unclear. Unfortunately, the Senate committee report takes into account only a handful of official intelligence estimates and excludes from consideration “less formal communications” between the White House and the intelligence community that undoubtedly contained even more details on the status (or non-status) of Iraq’s WMD programs. A more comprehensive investigation into these other intelligence channels would help clarify what information exactly was available to the White House and what to Congress, and the extent to which we can rightfully accuse the former of having lied to the public about the reasons for going to war.