[Update at end]
Since the invasion of Iraq one of the most persistent memes has been that the Bush administration, primarily in the person Dick Cheney (whose physiognomy ideals suits him to the role), slanted or cooked the Intel to justify the ill advised invasion of Iraq, a nation which is viewed by those who support the meme as having presented no danger to the United States and having minimal involvement in international Islamic terror. This meme has persisted despite the 9/11 Commission report concluding there was, and is, no evidence for it; on th other hand, there is an argument to be made that slanting of intelligence is inevitable and was almost certainly a factor in our decision to invade Iraq. This slanting would arise from both conscious and unconscious factors. However, the possibility of slanting in a potentially much more dangerous direction has rarely been mentioned or investigated.
First, the suggestion of slanting of Intelligence to support an invasion is an easy case to be made. The Military's job description is to protect and defend the United States from external enemies. As a part of their job they desire to have the most powerful tools and weapons and of necessity maintain a low threshold for threat assessment. If a dual use technology is developed or imported by our friends, they would treat this very differently than the same technology imported or developed by our enemies. Following an attack on the continental United Sates, the threshold would be even lower than usual. After 9/11, the standard of reasonable doubt could no longer be applied to our enemies in the Middle East. Diplomatic words take on less importance than belligerent words, and diplomatic acts become less significant than acts of belligerence. In such circumstances, Intelligence agencies, especially those associated with the Department of Defense, would be extremely likely to interpret the wisps of data known as Intel from the most hyper-vigilant stance. The danger of being wrong is clear.
The danger of slanting intelligence in the opposite direction is of even greater significance at this time. Recently we have seen explicit examples of such slanting and the consequences to the United Sates, and our friends and allies has been, and continues to be, severe.
While the Military concerns itself with defending us against the threat of violence, Diplomats have a very different job description. Their job is to avoid recourse to war by talking to our opponents (who are not enemies until war breaks out.) If war breaks out, they are effectively out of a job until the Military finish their work. The Diplomat has a tremendous incentive to maintain the semblance of peace even when war is likely just as the Military's preparations for war continue even during peace time.
The greatest failures of our Intelligence agencies has been the failure to discern threats when they exist and the slanting of Intel to deny threats even when the threat is effectively undeniable. Since prior to 9/11, there have been many people warning us that Islamic radicalism represented a real and pressing threat to America. Many more people minimized the risk and the threat in order to preserve the illusion of peace and safety. This tendency started at least as far back as the 1970s; Caroline Glick reported this yesterday (a story that the Powerline Bloggers reported in some depth; start here and here for a recap):
ON MARCH 1, 1973, eight Fatah terrorists, operating under the Black September banner stormed the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Khartoum, Sudan during a farewell party for the US Embassy's Charges d'Affaires George Curtis Moore. The terrorists took Moore, US ambassador Cleo Noel, Belgian Charges d'Affairs Guy Eid and two Arab diplomats hostage. They demanded that the US, Israel, Jordan and Germany release PLO and Baader-Meinhof Gang terrorists, including Robert F. Kennedy's Palestinian assassin Sirhan Sirhan and Black September commander Muhammed Awadh (Abu Daud), from prison in exchange for the hostages' release.
The next evening, the Palestinians brutally murdered Noel, Moore, and Eid. They released their other hostages on March 4.
Arafat denied any involvement in the attack. The US officially accepted his denial. Yet, as he later publicly revealed, James Welsh, who served at the time of the attack as an analyst at the National Security Agency, intercepted a communication from Arafat, then headquartered in Beirut to his terror agents in Khartoum ordering the attack.
In 1986, as evidence of Arafat's involvement in the operation became more widely known, more and more voices began calling for Arafat to be investigated for murder. As the New York Sun's online blog recalled last week, during that period, Britain's Sunday Times reported that 44 US senators sent a letter to then US attorney-general Edwin Meese, "urging the American government to charge the PLO chief with plotting the murders of two American diplomats in 1973."
The article went on to note that the Justice Department's interest in pursuing the matter was making senior State Department officials uneasy: "State Department diplomats, worried that murder charges against Arafat would anger the United States' friends in the Arab world, are urging the Justice Department to drop the investigation."
As late as 2002, in spite of President George W. Bush's pointed refusal to meet with Arafat, the State Department continued to protest his innocence. At the time, Scott Johnson, a Minneapolis attorney and one of the authors of the popular Powerlineblog weblog, inquired into the matter with the State Department's Near Eastern Affairs Bureau. In an emailed response from the bureau's deputy director of press affairs Gregory Sullivan, Johnson was told, "Evidence clearly points to the terrorist group Black September as having committed the assassinations of Amb. Noel and George Moore, and though Black September was a part of the Fatah movement, the linkage between Arafat and this group has never been established."
So it was that for 33 years, under seven consecutive presidential administrations, the State Department denied any knowledge of involvement by Arafat or Fatah in the execution of its own people.
Until last week.
THE CABLE released by the State Department's historian states, "The Khartoum operation was planned and carried out with the full knowledge and personal approval of Yasir Arafat, Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, (PLO), and the head of Fatah. Fatah representatives based in Khartoum participated in the attack, using a Fatah vehicle to transport the terrorists to the Saudi Arabian Embassy."
The need felt by the State Department to preserve the illusion of peace and amity in order to further their wishful fantasy of peace has damaged American foreign policy, Israel, and the Palestinian people for more than 30 years. The lie has also enabled the demonization of Israel and allowed Middle East despots, most of whom know better or should know better, to continue the heinous externalization which has prevented so much of the Islamic world form looking in the mirror and confronting their own failings. Such has been reaped from what State had sewn so long ago.
Unfortunately, it appears as if there are those who would compound the error, only this time in regards to a country that has been actively at war with the United States, and the West, since 1979.
Last week, an American raid in Baghdad led to the detaining of several Iranian nationals, along with a plethora of intelligence evidence that made our continued denial of ongoing Iranian acts of war insupportable. Allow Michael Ledeen to inform:
There is no escape from the war Iran is waging against us, the war that started in 1979 and is intensifying with every passing hour. We will shortly learn more about the documents we found accompanying the high-level Iranian terrorist leader we briefly arrested in Hakim’s compound in Baghdad some days ago, and what we will learn–what many key American officials have already learned–is stunning. At least to those who thought that Iran was “meddling” in Iraq, but refused to believe that it was total war, on a vast scale.
Several good journalists are working on this story (see, for example, today’s article by Eli Like in the NY Sun), and the outlines are pretty clear. First, we had good information that terrorists were in Baghdad, and had gone to the compound. We did not know exactly who they were. We entered the compound and arrested everybody who looked like a usual suspect. One of them told us he was the #3 official of the al Quds unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, a particularly vicious group. He was carrying documents, one of which was in essence a wiring diagram of Iranian operations in Iraq. That wiring diagram included both Shi’ite and Sunni terrorist groups, and was of such magnitude that American officials were flabbergasted. It seems that our misnamed Intelligence Community had grossly underestimated the sophistication and the enormity of the Iranian war campaign.
I am told that this information has reached the president, and that it is part of the body of information he is digesting in order to formulate his strategy for Iraq. If he sees clearly what is going on, he must realize that there can be no winning strategy for Iraq alone, since a lot of ‘Iraqi’ activity—not just lethal materiel such as the latest generation of explosive devices, now powerful enough to penetrate the armor of most of our vehicles—is actually Iranian in origin. We cannot ‘solve’ the Iraqi problem without regime change in Iran.
Eli Lake expanded on this in the Sun yesterday:
The news that American forces had captured Iranians in Iraq was widely reported last month, but less well known is that the Iranians were carrying documents that offered Americans insight into Iranian activities in Iraq.
An American intelligence official said the new material, which has been authenticated within the intelligence community, confirms "that Iran is working closely with both the Shiite militias and Sunni Jihadist groups." The source was careful to stress that the Iranian plans do not extend to cooperation with Baathist groups fighting the government in Baghdad, and said the documents rather show how the Quds Force — the arm of Iran's revolutionary guard that supports Shiite Hezbollah, Sunni Hamas, and Shiite death squads — is working with individuals affiliated with Al Qaeda in Iraq and Ansar al-Sunna.
Another American official who has seen the summaries of the reporting affiliated with the arrests said it comprised a "smoking gun." "We found plans for attacks, phone numbers affiliated with Sunni bad guys, a lot of things that filled in the blanks on what these guys are up to," the official said.
These two related stories, of Intel failures and perfidy, should be regarded as the scandals that they are; they comprise part of one of the great and relatively untold stories of the Islamic War against America that has been underway for a generation, ie, the ways in which our own Intel services have failed us.
The charge that Intel is slanted, spun, is true but meaningless without context. The fact is that Intel is always understood through the prism of the person evaluating the data and their attitude and bias will always determine how they understand what they learn. It is clear that our State Department for over 30 years has lied to itself and to the American people about the nature of the thugs we face in the Middle East. If they could overtly lie about Arafat, it is almost certain that in their desire for peace they will minimize and/or ignore uncomfortable data about Iran's behavior and intentions. In this, they have allies throughout the West in the MSM, Academia, Governments, NGOs, all too ready to turn a blind eye to information that conflicts with their narrative of peace loving Palestinians and Islamists driven to despair by American and Israeli insensitivity.
Those who interpret Intel through the most sensitive prisms are called war mongers and paranoids despite the fact that the Bush Administration actually toned down many of the conclusions they were offered by the Intel community.
Our elites should only be so sensitive to the danger of hyposensitivity to the dangers we face.
In the face of potential danger, the person who is overly sensitive will likely prepare to run or fight, often unnecessarily; the person who is overly insensitive to danger will likely be completely unprepared.
Perhaps the recent demotion of John Negroponte, a career Diplomat who has been our first director of national intelligence, is a sign that reality is penetrating the fog of bureaucracy that pervades our Federal Government.
Update: Encouraged by Mark Safraski's comment below, I did some more reading and found an interesting post by Pundita, John Negroponte to State, at last! She believes this is an excellent move, that he accomplished some of what he needed to do as DNI (though under the radar) and that his presence at State has the potential to bring important changes there. Obviously, time will tell. At the same time, this does not invalidate the argument that State's POV is a poor fit for the world we live in; in fact, her analysis may support that argument.
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