The Truth @ The Spin Factor

Irrelevant Intelligence: Bush misrepresents historian’s comments as pro-Iraq war propaganda

You may have read a great article by Arthur Silber pointing out that, You, Too, Can and Should Be an “Intelligence Analyst”. The basic premise is the intelligence community has little more access than you do to critical information, and that privileged information becomes irrelevant too quickly to be a major factor in foreign policy decisions.

Thus, the decision to go to war has less to do with military intelligence than it has to do with whims and irrational internal politics (read: whatever is convenient for the people in power). After all, you have an essentially unlimited number of choices from everything to what you will wear, to what you will have for breakfast, and just how you’ll get your work done today. Why is foreign policy any different? The choices aren’t only “war” and “cut and run” as this administration would have you believe. Did we have to give Saddam Hussein an ultimatum (leave the country or prepare for war) even if he had WMDs?

Ray McGovern writes in Bush’s War Drums:

Generally speaking, 80 percent of the information one needs to form judgments on key intelligence targets or issues is available in open media. It helps to have been trained-as my contemporaries and I had the good fortune to be trained-by past masters of the discipline of media analysis, which began in a structured way in targeting Japanese and German media in the 1940s. But, truth be told, anyone with a high school education can do it. It is not rocket science.

You’d have to believe your government is incompetent if our only choice was to invade Iraq. Or maybe you’d believe it anyway. But our intelligence agencies aren’t incompetent. The problem is, as Arthur Silber points out, intelligence is irrelevant.

Intelligence is completely irrelevant to major policy decisions. Such decisions are matters of judgment, and knowledgeable, ordinary citizens are just as capable of making these determinations as political leaders allegedly in possession of “secret information.” Such “secret information” is almost always wrong — and major decisions, including those pertaining to war and peace, are made entirely apart from such information in any case.

The second you start arguing about intelligence, you’ve given the game away once again. This is a game the government and the proponents of war will always win. By now, we all surely know that if they want the intelligence to show that Country X is a “grave” and “growing” threat, they will find it or manufacture it. So once you’re debating what the intelligence shows or fails to show, the debate is over. The war will inevitably begin.

Gabriel Kolko explains:

It is all too rare that states overcome illusions, and the United States is no more an exception than Germany, Italy, England, or France before it. The function of intelligence anywhere is far less to encourage rational behavior–although sometimes that occurs–than to justify a nation’s illusions, and it is the false expectations that conventional wisdom encourages that make wars more likely, a pattern that has only increased since the early twentieth century. By and large, US, Soviet, and British strategic intelligence since 1945 has been inaccurate and often misleading, and although it accumulated pieces of information that were useful, the leaders of these nations failed to grasp the inherent dangers of their overall policies. When accurate, such intelligence has been ignored most of the time if there were overriding preconceptions or bureaucratic reasons for doing so.

Because when intelligence doesn’t support your goals, you can just dismiss it and revise history:

What’s next? On to Iran

Since we are labeling Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization for “supplying the weapons that are killing a growing number of American soldiers in Iraq” and since we are already over there, why not? It appears that the main reason for going to Iraq in the first place was to maintain a foothold in the Middle East and secure the region for our perpetually-muddled “ally” Israel. If the door starts to close because our military is spreading thin (as shown in the video above) the only way to keep it open (and transfer some of the responsibility for the war to the next lucky administration) is to engage Iran militarily (but it’s not really Iran, it’s the terroristic Revolutionary Guard! Oh, the wonders of the vague war on terrorism!) Of course, this is irrational, because we don’t belong in Iraq in the first place, and second, if Iran had invaded Canada or Mexico, you can be sure our government would be supplying Iran’s enemies with weapons, to maintain some control over our neighboring terroritory and protect ourselves passively by proxy.

August 24th, 2007 Posted by eaglescout | Analysis, Intelligence (Military), Iraq War, Journalism, Military, Neoconservatives, Politics, Terrorism, Truth | 2 comments