The Real Intelligence Failure

Seems to me that everyone (except me of course) has missed the real Iraq intelligence failure. The WMD issue seems relatively trivial. Suppose Bush knew on September 12 that Hussein had no significant stockpiles of any WMD. He still could, and most likely would, have made the case for military force to get the inspectors back in. He'd have pointed to the fact that Hussein still had the scientists and therefore the knowledge and therefore the potential threat, both in himself and in providing stuff to bin Laden. Because Hussein's cooperation with the reinstalled inspectors in January/February 2003 wasn't sufficient for Bush and Blair, Bush would still have gone to war. So better WMD intelligence might not have changed decision making.

Where the intelligence establishment failed was in the assessment of the state of Iraq's economy and society. There's been no evidence in all of the postmortems that much attention was paid to the subject. Everyone just assumed, as Wolfowitz I think said, that it would be easy to get the oil flowing. We also assumed that we could easily improve the state of the economy, more electricity in particular. Finally we assumed that an invasion and overthrow of the government would not unleash any energies, like looters. In part we may have been misled by the aftermath of the Afghanistan conflict.

It looks to me as if Bush was the victim of the bureaucracy--bureaucracies shape the way issues are posed and resolved, as we can see in the case of Iraq. CIA was focused on the threat, on getting secret information, on what is needed to make a decision. It didn't have any customers asking for data on how old the generators were, what Iraq had done given the embargo on spare parts, etc. DOD was focused on the invasion, avoiding a quagmire and minimizing casualties. They were late in planning for post-conflict action. State did planning for the aftermath, but didn't have responsibility. Gen. Garner or Ambassador Bremer should have been called in August 2002 (the Blair election showed that Bush had effectively made the go decision by July) and told: "We aren't sure there's going to be an invasion of Iraq. But if there is, you're in charge of picking up the pieces and rebuilding. You can task the intelligence establishment to try to get all the information you need."

If we had had a "nation building" bureaucracy sitting in the decision making meetings, they might have flagged our lack of information and raised the question of money. Without a bureaucracy to represent that viewpoint, everyone from Bush on down blithely assumed a rosy scenario.