Foreign Intelligence vis a vis WMDs and Iran

Published February 19, 2007

The Misuses of Intelligence


"Last week, we had a couple of object lessons in how to use -- or
misuse -- foreign intelligence.

The first emerges from reports by U.S. military authorities in Iraq
that weapons have been used there against American forces which seem
highly likely to have come from Iran. To many of us, these reports
seem unremarkable. There is every reason to believe that the mullah
regime in Iran wishes us ill, and the border between Iraq and Iran,
much of it highly mountainous, is surely porous. Yet from many critics
of the administration emanate cries that these reports are not to be
given credence -- they are just a ploy to justify military action
against Iran.

To be sure, it appears that our military has been given orders to take
action against Iranian agents in Iraq and that those orders have been
followed. One wonders why such orders weren't given long ago. And
there is certainly a case to be made -- I'd make it myself -- against
a land war in Iran. But why should the reports be treated with
suspicion?

The mullah regime has been making war against the United States since
1979. It committed an act of war against us by imprisoning our
diplomats for 444 days. It sponsored Hezbollah, whose suicide bomber
killed 240 Marines in Lebanon in 1983. It was behind the attack on the
U.S. barracks in Khobar Towers in 1996. It calls the United States the
Great Satan, and its current president has called for the eradication
of the United States and Israel. The New York Times laments that
America is "bullying" Iran. Actually, the mullah regime has been
bullying the United States for 28 years.

So why the suspicion? The answer seems to be that because intelligence
erred in its judgment that Saddam Hussein's regime had weapons of mass
destruction it could be erring here, too: All intelligence that could
be used to justify military action is inherently dubious.

But the conclusion of our intelligence community -- and that of every
other nation with serious intelligence capacity -- that Saddam had WMD
was eminently justifiable. Saddam had possessed and used WMD in the
past; he had resisted and evaded WMD inspections; and, as we have
learned from Charles Duelfer, he retained the capacity to produce WMD
in the future.

We found in 1991 that his nuclear program was further along than our
intelligence agencies thought. No responsible American leader could
have given Saddam the presumption of innocence and assumed he had no
WMD until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. George W. Bush
didn't. Neither did Bill Clinton.

The critics seem to be assuming that we can somehow obtain
intelligence that is 100 percent accurate. But that is not possible in
the real world. Intelligence tries to get information that regimes are
making great effort to conceal -- evil regimes, in the case of Saddam
and the mullahs. Our leaders must make decisions based on incomplete
and highly imperfect information. And that information can remain
imperfect for a long time. We still don't know what Saddam did with
the WMD he once had and never accounted for.

The second object lesson was the Defense Department Inspector
General's report accusing former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy
Douglas Feith of "inappropriate" behavior in presenting a briefing
critical of intelligence community consensus.

The IG conceded that Feith's briefing was legal and authorized by his
superiors, and did not criticize them for authorizing it. But it was
somehow "inappropriate" for Feith to question the conclusion that
there was no significant cooperation between Saddam's regime and al-
Qaida.

What Feith did was to point to the intelligence community's own
evidence of such cooperation and to question the assumption made by
analysts that there could be no cooperation between Sunnis and
Shiites. As we now know, such cooperation is very common. If your job
is to protect the United States, you cannot assume it can't happen.
Britain and France paid a high price for assuming that Hitler's
Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union would never cooperate.

Again we encounter the idea that intelligence agencies' conclusions
should be regarded as Holy Writ, not to be questioned or analyzed
critically by high government officials -- that there can be an
intelligence product that is 100 percent accurate, and that every
intelligence community conclusion must be treated as if it is.

The Bush critics' position is that we must believe without reservation
or criticism any intelligence that can be used to argue against
military action and that we should never believe any intelligence,
however plausible, that can be used to argue for it. That's not very
intelligent."