The story of the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran raises some interesting questions, like "If they got it wrong two years ago, why should we believe them now?", "Don’t they ever get anything right?" and "How could Bush be so stupid?".
Dennis Ross asks a better question in The New Republic. (See here.) He wonders why the NIE makes the Iranian suspension of their covert nuclear program in 2003 its main point (assuming the intelligence community is right, this time), as opposed to the fact that the Iranians are continuing their efforts to either enrich uranium or separate out plutonium. According to Ross, making weapons out of fissionable material is easy; producing fissionable material is not. What the Iranians have done, then, is merely to stop working on the easy thing while continuing to work on the hard one. And the effect? Stopping work on the easy thing while you continue working on the hard one is not going to slow down your timetable that much. But the NIE doesn’t mention that.
By emphasizing the wrong question, the NIE has undermined the United States’ policy toward Iran and made it more difficult, not only for the US but also Western Europe, to stop Iran from either getting nuclear weapons or at least being in a position where their regional neighbors will think, and react as if, the Iranians will shortly be getting nuclear weapons.
Ross says the intelligence community can be criticized for focusing the NIE on the wrong issue, but he saves most of his criticism for what he claims was the mismanagement of the disclosure of the NIE by the Bush administration.
Ross almost wonders why the Bush administration disclosed the NIE, noting that NIEs are usually not publicized, but he finally admits this one would have leaked if the Bush administration had not disclosed it. But he still complains that the Bush administration did not properly warn our allies of what was coming.
These are valid points, but other questions remain. Assuming that the NIE had to be disclosed because it would in any case have been leaked, who would have leaked it? Why did the NIE ask the question this way? Since the NIE was going to be leaked if it was not disclosed, doesn’t that mean that whoever got to decide what questions to emphasize and how to phrase them was able to, in effect, decide US policy on Iran? And finally, perhaps the most important question (a question that I touched on almost a year and a half ago {see here}): Who is running our intelligence agencies, and why?
On the first question, Ross says the NIE would have been leaked once the Congressional oversight committees were briefed on its contents, implying the leaks would have come from Congress. But is that true? Would the leaks have waited that long? Might they have come even earlier, from somebody else?
With respect to the second and third questions, is it really likely the Bush administration wanted the questions in the NIE presented this way? Or is it more likely that people at the CIA and the other intelligence agencies provided not only the answers but also the questions?
In thinking about these questions, consider the following:
During the 2004 election, the CIA allowed one of its then-current employees to write a book highly critical of the Bush’s Iraq policy and to go on a publicity tour to talk about the book. (Books by CIA employees have to be reviewed before they can be published.) I would understand somebody from the Department of Agriculture or Health and Human Services, but the CIA, our intelligence agency? Aren’t they are supposed to keep secrets? Why was this approved?
Similarly, how much of the whole Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame brouhaha was really aimed at trying to divert attention from all of the mistakes the CIA made in its intelligence reports about Iraq during the last years of Saddam Hussein’s rule? Was Wilson trying to get Bush or was he just trying to protect his wife and her friends at work?
Wasn’t Representative Peter Hoekstra concerned about who was really running the CIA in the letter he sent to President Bush back in May of 2006? (See here again.)
Many people, including some who are not generally supportive of President Bush on Iran (or other things, for that matter), agree the new NIE on Iran has harmed the cause of keeping Iran from getting nuclear weapons. So why was it written this way? I do not know, but Jim Hoagland said this:
"The intelligence community — and particularly the CIA … — has today made itself a separate agency of government, answerable essentially to itself. This NIE makes clear that for better or worse, spy agencies today make the finished product of policy rather than providing the raw materials."
Hoagland does not object to this:
"On balance, the consequences of disclosure are positive: As its authors clearly intended, the document removes any basis for the U.S. military strikes on Iran that many of us have argued would be unwise and unnecessary."
But clearly Hoagland’s view is based on his approval out of the policy outcome. One wonders if he would feel the same if there was a different President and a different CIA.
He certainly does not seem to consider whether one really wants the intelligence agencies to have a foreign policy that is different from that of the President and what it says about democratic government if unelected, and apparently uncontrolled, bureaucrats get to decide what our foreign policy is.
[12/29/2007 (further revised): I may have remembered incorrectly when I said that "the CIA allowed one of its then-current employees to write a book highly critical of the Bush’s Iraq policy and to go on a publicity tour to talk about the book". What I remembered was probably this (see Robert Novak here): "The CIA's contempt for the president was demonstrated during his 2004 re-election campaign when a senior intelligence officer, Paul R. Pillar, made off-the-record speeches around the country criticizing the invasion of Iraq." My point is valid, however, since it is hard to believe those speeches could have been made without at least agency acquiescence.]
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