[Mb-hair] Intelligence, Policy, and the War in Iraq By Paul R. Pillar Foreign Affairs

[Michael Butler]

   A Very Insightful Article About What Should Be Done
   Michael

    Intelligence, Policy,and the War in Iraq
    By Paul R. Pillar
    Foreign Affairs

    March/April 2006 Issue

    A Dysfunctional Relationship

    The most serious problem with US intelligence today is that its
relationship with the policymaking process is broken and badly needs repair.
In the wake of the Iraq war, it has become clear that 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. As the national intelligence officer
responsible for the Middle East from 2000 to 2005, I witnessed all of these
disturbing developments.

    Public discussion of prewar intelligence on Iraq has focused on the
errors made in assessing Saddam Hussein's unconventional weapons programs. A
commission chaired by Judge Laurence Silberman and former Senator Charles
Robb usefully documented the intelligence community's mistakes in a solid
and comprehensive report released in March 2005. Corrections were indeed in
order, and the intelligence community has begun to make them.

    At the same time, an acrimonious and highly partisan debate broke out
over whether the Bush administration manipulated and misused intelligence in
making its case for war. The administration defended itself by pointing out
that it was not alone in its view that Saddam had weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) and active weapons programs, however mistaken that view
may have been.

    In this regard, the Bush administration was quite right: its perception
of Saddam's weapons capacities was shared by the Clinton administration,
congressional Democrats, and most other Western governments and intelligence
services. But in making this defense, the White House also inadvertently
pointed out the real problem: intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs did not
drive its decision to go to war. A view broadly held in the United States
and even more so overseas was that deterrence of Iraq was working, that
Saddam was being kept "in his box," and that the best way to deal with the
weapons problem was through an aggressive inspections program to supplement
the sanctions already in place. That the administration arrived at so
different a policy solution indicates that its decision to topple Saddam was
driven by other factors - namely, the desire to shake up the sclerotic power
structures of the Middle East and hasten the spread of more liberal politics
and economics in the region.

    If the entire body of official intelligence analysis on Iraq had a
policy implication, it was to avoid war - or, if war was going to be
launched, to prepare for a messy aftermath. What is most remarkable about
prewar US intelligence on Iraq is not that it got things wrong and thereby
misled policymakers; it is that it played so small a role in one of the most
important US policy decisions in recent decades.

    A Model Upended

    The proper relationship between intelligence gathering and policymaking
sharply separates the two functions. The intelligence community collects
information, evaluates its credibility, and combines it with other
information to help make sense of situations abroad that could affect US
interests. Intelligence officers decide which topics should get their
limited collection and analytic resources according to both their own
judgments and the concerns of policymakers. Policymakers thus influence
which topics intelligence agencies address but not the conclusions that they
reach. The intelligence community, meanwhile, limits its judgments to what
is happening or what might happen overseas, avoiding policy judgments about
what the United States should do in response.

    In practice, this distinction is often blurred, especially because
analytic projections may have policy implications even if they are not
explicitly stated. But the distinction is still important. National security
abounds with problems that are clearer than the solutions to them; the case
of Iraq is hardly a unique example of how similar perceptions of a threat
can lead people to recommend very different policy responses. Accordingly,
it is critical that the intelligence community not advocate policy,
especially not openly. If it does, it loses the most important basis for its
credibility and its claims to objectivity. When intelligence analysts
critique one another's work, they use the phrase "policy prescriptive" as a
pejorative, and rightly so.

    The Bush administration's use of intelligence on Iraq did not just blur
this distinction; it turned the entire model upside down. The administration
used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision
already made. It went to war without requesting - and evidently without
being influenced by - any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any
aspect of Iraq. (The military made extensive use of intelligence in its war
planning, although much of it was of a more tactical nature.) Congress, not
the administration, asked for the now-infamous October 2002 National
Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's unconventional weapons programs,
although few members of Congress actually read it. (According to several
congressional aides responsible for safeguarding the classified material, no
more than six senators and only a handful of House members got beyond the
five-page executive summary.) As the national intelligence officer for the
Middle East, I was in charge of coordinating all of the intelligence
community's assessments regarding Iraq; the first request I received from
any administration policymaker for any such assessment was not until a year
into the war.

    Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed, but even
with its flaws, it was not what led to the war. On the issue that mattered
most, the intelligence community judged that Iraq probably was several years
away from developing a nuclear weapon. The October 2002 NIE also judged that
Saddam was unlikely to use WMD against the United States unless his regime
was placed in mortal danger.

    Before the war, on its own initiative, the intelligence community
considered the principal challenges that any postinvasion authority in Iraq
would be likely to face. It presented a picture of a political culture that
would not provide fertile ground for democracy and foretold a long,
difficult, and turbulent transition. It projected that a Marshall Plan-type
effort would be required to restore the Iraqi economy, despite Iraq's
abundant oil resources. It forecast that in a deeply divided Iraqi society,
with Sunnis resentful over the loss of their dominant position and Shiites
seeking power commensurate with their majority status, there was a
significant chance that the groups would engage in violent conflict unless
an occupying power prevented it. And it anticipated that a foreign occupying
force would itself be the target of resentment and attacks - including by
guerrilla warfare - unless it established security and put Iraq on the road
to prosperity in the first few weeks or months after the fall of Saddam.

    In addition, the intelligence community offered its assessment of the
likely regional repercussions of ousting Saddam. It argued that any value
Iraq might have as a democratic exemplar would be minimal and would depend
on the stability of a new Iraqi government and the extent to which democracy
in Iraq was seen as developing from within rather than being imposed by an
outside power. More likely, war and occupation would boost political Islam
and increase sympathy for terrorists' objectives - and Iraq would become a
magnet for extremists from elsewhere in the Middle East.

    Standard Deviations

    The Bush administration deviated from the professional standard not only
in using policy to drive intelligence, but also in aggressively using
intelligence to win public support for its decision to go to war. This meant
selectively adducing data - "cherry-picking" - rather than using the
intelligence community's own analytic judgments. In fact, key portions of
the administration's case explicitly rejected those judgments. In an August
2002 speech, for example, Vice President Dick Cheney observed that
"intelligence is an uncertain business" and noted how intelligence analysts
had underestimated how close Iraq had been to developing a nuclear weapon
before the 1991 Persian Gulf War. His conclusion - at odds with that of the
intelligence community - was that "many of us are convinced that Saddam will
acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon."

    In the upside-down relationship between intelligence and policy that
prevailed in the case of Iraq, the administration selected pieces of raw
intelligence to use in its public case for war, leaving the intelligence
community to register varying degrees of private protest when such use
started to go beyond what analysts deemed credible or reasonable. 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.

    The reexamination of prewar public statements is a necessary part of
understanding the process that led to the Iraq war. But a narrow focus on
rhetorical details tends to overlook more fundamental problems in the
intelligence-policy relationship. Any time policymakers, rather than
intelligence agencies, take the lead in selecting which bits of raw
intelligence to present, there is - regardless of the issue - a bias. The
resulting public statements ostensibly reflect intelligence, but they do not
reflect intelligence analysis, which is an essential part of determining
what the pieces of raw reporting mean. The policymaker acts with an eye not
to what is indicative of a larger pattern or underlying truth, but to what
supports his case.

    Another problem is that on Iraq, the intelligence community was pulled
over the line into policy advocacy - not so much by what it said as by its
conspicuous role in the administration's public case for war. This was
especially true when the intelligence community was made highly visible
(with the director of central intelligence literally in the camera frame) in
an intelligence-laden presentation by Secretary of State Colin Powell to the
UN Security Council a month before the war began. It was also true in the
fall of 2002, when, at the administration's behest, the intelligence
community published a white paper on Iraq's WMD programs - but without
including any of the community's judgments about the likelihood of those
weapons' being used.

    But the greatest discrepancy between the administration's public
statements and the intelligence community's judgments concerned not WMD
(there was indeed a broad consensus that such programs existed), but the
relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda. The enormous attention devoted to
this subject did not reflect any judgment by intelligence officials that
there was or was likely to be anything like the "alliance" the
administration said existed. The reason the connection got so much attention
was that the administration wanted to hitch the Iraq expedition to the "war
on terror" and the threat the American public feared most, thereby
capitalizing on the country's militant post-9/11 mood.

    The issue of possible ties between Saddam and al Qaeda was especially
prone to the selective use of raw intelligence to make a public case for
war. In the shadowy world of international terrorism, almost anyone can be
"linked" to almost anyone else if enough effort is made to find evidence of
casual contacts, the mentioning of names in the same breath, or indications
of common travels or experiences. Even the most minimal and circumstantial
data can be adduced as evidence of a "relationship," ignoring the important
question of whether a given regime actually supports a given terrorist group
and the fact that relationships can be competitive or distrustful rather
than cooperative.

    The intelligence community never offered any analysis that supported the
notion of an alliance between Saddam and al Qaeda. Yet it was drawn into a
public effort to support that notion. To be fair, Secretary Powell's
presentation at the UN never explicitly asserted that there was a
cooperative relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda. But the presentation
was clearly meant to create the impression that one existed. To the extent
that the intelligence community was a party to such efforts, it crossed the
line into policy advocacy - and did so in a way that fostered public
misconceptions contrary to the intelligence community's own judgments.

    Varities of Politicization

    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.

    On the issue of Iraqi WMD, dozens of analysts throughout the
intelligence community were making many judgments on many different issues
based on fragmentary and ambiguous evidence. The differences between sound
intelligence analysis (bearing in mind the gaps in information) and the
flawed analysis that actually was produced had to do mainly with matters of
caveat, nuance, and word choice. The opportunities for bias were numerous.
It may not be possible to point to one key instance of such bending or to
measure the cumulative effect of such pressure. But the effect was probably
significant.

    A clearer form of politicization is the inconsistent review of analysis:
reports that conform to policy preferences have an easier time making it
through the gauntlet of coordination and approval than ones that do not.
(Every piece of intelligence analysis reflects not only the judgments of the
analysts most directly involved in writing it, but also the concurrence of
those who cover related topics and the review, editing, and remanding of it
by several levels of supervisors, from branch chiefs to senior executives.)
The Silberman-Robb commission noted such inconsistencies in the Iraq case
but chalked it up to bad management. The commission failed to address
exactly why managers were inconsistent: they wanted to avoid the
unpleasantness of laying unwelcome analysis on a policymaker's desk.

    Another form of politicization with a similar cause is the sugarcoating
of what otherwise would be an unpalatable message. Even the mostly prescient
analysis about the problems likely to be encountered in postwar Iraq
included some observations that served as sugar, added in the hope that
policymakers would not throw the report directly into the burn bag, but
damaging the clarity of the analysis in the process.

    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.

    One possible consequence of such politicization is policymaker
self-deception. A policymaker can easily forget that he is hearing so much
about a particular angle in briefings because he and his fellow policymakers
have urged the intelligence community to focus on it. A more certain
consequence is the skewed application of the intelligence community's
resources. Feeding the administration's voracious appetite for material on
the Saddam-al Qaeda link consumed an enormous amount of time and attention
at multiple levels, from rank-and-file counterterrorism analysts to the most
senior intelligence officials. It is fair to ask how much other
counterterrorism work was left undone as a result.

    The issue became even more time-consuming as the conflict between
intelligence officials and policymakers escalated into a battle, with the
intelligence community struggling to maintain its objectivity even as
policymakers pressed the Saddam-al Qaeda connection. The administration's
rejection of the intelligence community's judgments became especially clear
with the formation of a special Pentagon unit, the Policy Counterterrorism
Evaluation Group. The unit, which reported to Undersecretary of Defense
Douglas Feith, was dedicated to finding every possible link between Saddam
and al Qaeda, and its briefings accused the intelligence community of faulty
analysis for failing to see the supposed alliance.

    For the most part, the intelligence community's own substantive
judgments do not appear to have been compromised. (A possible important
exception was the construing of an ambiguous, and ultimately recanted,
statement from a detainee as indicating that Saddam's Iraq provided
jihadists with chemical or biological training.) But although the charge of
faulty analysis was never directly conveyed to the intelligence community
itself, enough of the charges leaked out to create a public perception of
rancor between the administration and the intelligence community, which in
turn encouraged some administration supporters to charge intelligence
officers (including me) with trying to sabotage the president's policies.
This poisonous atmosphere reinforced the disinclination within the
intelligence community to challenge the consensus view about Iraqi WMD
programs; any such challenge would have served merely to reaffirm the
presumptions of the accusers.

    Partial Repairs

    Although the Iraq war has provided a particularly stark illustration of
the problems in the intelligence-policy relationship, such problems are not
confined to this one issue or this specific administration. Four decades
ago, the misuse of intelligence about an ambiguous encounter in the Gulf of
Tonkin figured prominently in the Johnson administration's justification for
escalating the military effort in Vietnam. Over a century ago, the possible
misinterpretation of an explosion on a US warship in Havana harbor helped
set off the chain of events that led to a war of choice against Spain. The
Iraq case needs further examination and reflection on its own. But public
discussion of how to foster a better relationship between intelligence
officials and policymakers and how to ensure better use of intelligence on
future issues is also necessary.

    Intelligence affects the nation's interests through its effect on
policy. No matter how much the process of intelligence gathering itself is
fixed, the changes will do no good if the role of intelligence in the
policymaking process is not also addressed. Unfortunately, there is no
single clear fix to the sort of problem that arose in the case of Iraq. The
current ill will may not be reparable, and the perception of the
intelligence community on the part of some policymakers - that Langley is
enemy territory - is unlikely to change. But a few steps, based on the
recognition that the intelligence-policy relationship is indeed broken,
could reduce the likelihood that such a breakdown will recur.

    On this point, the United States should emulate the United Kingdom,
where discussion of this issue has been more forthright, by declaring once
and for all that its intelligence services should not be part of public
advocacy of policies still under debate. In the United Kingdom, Prime
Minister Tony Blair accepted a commission of inquiry's conclusions that
intelligence and policy had been improperly commingled in such exercises as
the publication of the "dodgy dossier," the British counterpart to the
United States' Iraqi WMD white paper, and that in the future there should be
a clear delineation between intelligence and policy. An American declaration
should take the form of a congressional resolution and be seconded by a
statement from the White House. Although it would not have legal force, such
a statement would discourage future administrations from attempting to pull
the intelligence community into policy advocacy. It would also give some
leverage to intelligence officers in resisting any such future attempts.

    A more effective way of identifying and exposing improprieties in the
relationship is also needed. The CIA has a "politicization ombudsman," but
his informally defined functions mostly involve serving as a sympathetic ear
for analysts disturbed by evidence of politicization and then summarizing
what he hears for senior agency officials. The intelligence oversight
committees in Congress have an important role, but the heightened
partisanship that has bedeviled so much other work on Capitol Hill has had
an especially inhibiting effect in this area. A promised effort by the
Senate Intelligence Committee to examine the Bush administration's use of
intelligence on Iraq got stuck in the partisan mud. The House committee has
not even attempted to address the subject.

    The legislative branch is the appropriate place for monitoring the
intelligence-policy relationship. But the oversight should be conducted by a
nonpartisan office modeled on the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and
the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Such an office would have a staff,
smaller than that of the GAO or the CBO, of officers experienced in
intelligence and with the necessary clearances and access to examine
questions about both the politicization of classified intelligence work and
the public use of intelligence. As with the GAO, this office could conduct
inquiries at the request of members of Congress. It would make its results
public as much as possible, consistent with security requirements, and it
would avoid duplicating the many other functions of intelligence oversight,
which would remain the responsibility of the House and Senate intelligence
committees.

    Beyond these steps, there is the more difficult issue of what place the
intelligence community should occupy within the executive branch. The
reorganization that created the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence (DNI) is barely a year old, and yet another reorganization at
this time would compound the disruption. But the flaws in the narrowly
conceived and hastily considered reorganization legislation of December 2004
- such as ambiguities in the DNI's authority - will make it necessary to
reopen the issues it addressed. Any new legislation should also tackle
something the 2004 legislation did not: the problem of having the leaders of
the intelligence community, which is supposed to produce objective and
unvarnished analysis, serve at the pleasure of the president.

    The organizational issue is also difficult because of a dilemma that
intelligence officers have long discussed and debated among themselves: that
although distance from policymakers may be needed for objectivity, closeness
is needed for influence. For most of the past quarter century, intelligence
officials have striven for greater closeness, in a perpetual quest for
policymakers' ears. The lesson of the Iraq episode, however, is that the
supposed dilemma has been incorrectly conceived. Closeness in this case did
not buy influence, even on momentous issues of war and peace; it bought only
the disadvantages of politicization.

    The intelligence community should be repositioned to reflect the fact
that influence and relevance flow not just from face time in the Oval
Office, but also from credibility with Congress and, most of all, with the
American public. The community needs to remain in the executive branch but
be given greater independence and a greater ability to communicate with
those other constituencies (fettered only by security considerations, rather
than by policy agendas). An appropriate model is the Federal Reserve, which
is structured as a quasi-autonomous body overseen by a board of governors
with long fixed terms.

    These measures would reduce both the politicization of the intelligence
community's own work and the public misuse of intelligence by policymakers.
It would not directly affect how much attention policymakers give to
intelligence, which they would continue to be entitled to ignore. But the
greater likelihood of being called to public account for discrepancies
between a case for a certain policy and an intelligence judgment would have
the indirect effect of forcing policymakers to pay more attention to those
judgments in the first place.

    These changes alone will not fix the intelligence-policy relationship.
But if Congress and the American people are serious about "fixing
intelligence," they should not just do what is easy and politically
convenient. At stake are the soundness of US foreign-policy making and the
right of Americans to know the basis for decisions taken in the name of
their security.

    Paul R. Pillar is on the faculty of the Security Studies Program at
Georgetown University. Concluding a long career in the Central Intelligence
Agency, he served as National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and
South Asia from 2000 to 2005.