John Prados is a senior fellow of the National Security Archive in Washington, DC. His forthcoming book is Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (Ivan Dee Publisher).
Late last month , prompted by the U.S. visit of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, six senators wrote to request that Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte deliver a fresh National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. With Baghdad in absolute chaos, beset by murders, bombings, apparent Iraqi government impotence and more, theirs was a logical concern. The legislators asked that the estimate address the range of issues that you would expect of such an assessment: sectarianism (as the letter put it, “Is Iraq in or descending into a civil war?”), security, terrorism, political development, economic reconstruction, the Iraqi future and U.S. force posture.
When nothing happened after a week, Massachusetts Senator Edward M. Kennedy introduced a requirement for an Iraq NIE into the authorizing legislation for next year's intelligence budget. Within a couple of days a Negroponte spokesperson informed reporters that the director would “shortly” authorize the drafting of an estimate.
There is a story here, and I’m sorry to say it is the usual tale of purposefully ignoring that the emperor has no clothes. It bears repeating that the role of National Intelligence Estimates is to inform policy, especially presidential decision-making, by collating information from the entire American intelligence community. In time of war these analyses are especially crucial, because they give the person in the Oval Office a perspective not wedded to the programs of government agencies.
Bush surrogates are fond of insisting that Iraq is nothing like America’s last extended war, Vietnam. Here, at least, they are right. In 1965, the big year of U.S. escalation in Vietnam, the Johnson administration benefited from a dozen or more National Intelligence Estimates, or their slightly less-refined cousins, Special National Intelligence Estimates. Virtually every policy option Johnson had on his plate in Vietnam was addressed in a specific NIE. On the other hand, there has not been a single Iraq NIE published by the intelligence community in two years.
There is more. Ground-shifting events and key episodes are moments for national estimates, which try to foresee how situations will evolve. Since the summer of 2004, when then-director of central intelligence George J. Tenet produced the last Iraq NIE, there have been a whole series of developments that furnished occasions for reassessment, almost all of which have been touted as decisive by the Bush administration. These include, but are not limited to, Iraqi votes on a constituent assembly, a constitution and a permanent government; the alleged success of reconstruction; the trial of Saddam Hussein; and the death of terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Bush ordered no NIE.
President Bush personally conducted a propaganda campaign that introduced a “victory” strategy for Iraq and asserted that victory was being attained. No NIEs underlay that claim.
Earlier this year the administration rolled out the prospect—swiftly abandoned—of beginning U.S. withdrawals from Iraq, supposedly based on the progress of operations. Again, no NIE.
Don’t stop there, either. In September 2004 Bush swore in a fresh CIA director, Porter Goss, whose asserted program was to take risks to provide the best intelligence and fearlessly call the shots as the analysts saw them. Iraq was the biggest national security issue on his plate at the time, yet Goss did nothing to produce an NIE on the subject.
Later Goss was superceded as spy boss by the new intelligence czar John Negroponte. Negroponte’s previous job had been as U.S. ambassador to Baghdad. He certainly knew the importance of the issue. Negroponte, too, did nothing to produce an Iraq estimate, for 18 months, until prodded by Congress. The gossip in Washington, in fact, is that Negroponte resisted calls for a new NIE from intelligence analysts who felt a fresh assessment long since necessary.
The woes of Iraq regrettably provide a perfect prism in which to view the relationship between George W. Bush and U.S. intelligence. Bush exploited the intelligence to obtain his authority for war in Iraq, then turned on the CIA when it did not tell him what he wanted to hear. Before the U.S. attack on Saddam’s Iraq, the CIA’s chief Middle East analyst warned of the possibility of civil war. These concerns were derided. The post-invasion CIA station chief in Baghdad was shunted out of the agency after reporting that Iraq was on a “glide path” to civil war. His successor’s career stalled after filing similarly pessimistic reports.
The 2004 NIE itself projected several alternative scenarios for Iraq’s future, one of which was a descent to civil war, which the estimate reportedly concluded was quite possible. Bush publicly called the National Intelligence Estimate a “guess.” Though the president was forced within days to step back from that claim, he simultaneously said the NIE spoke of “possibility” where “what’s important for the American people to hear is reality.” What is clear is that George Bush does not want to hear what a National Intelligence Estimate can tell him.
George Tenet’s Iraq estimate, among his last acts as America’s spy chieftain, emerges almost as an heroic effort to sound the warning bell. As Baghdad burns today, the Bush administration is desperately committed to insisting that the “sectarian violence” taking place in Iraq is no civil war. Imagine the anxieties that must play on the minds of intelligence analysts now asked to draft Negroponte’s Iraq NIE. What do you say? And what happens to you after you say it? Platoons of analysts must be running away as fast as they can from participation on this project.
The community’s current chief analyst for the Middle East, Alan Pino, is an experienced officer with more than two decades work on the subject, including with the Counterterrorism Center and on estimates before the Gulf War. There is no reason to suppose he would hesitate to tell truth to power, but there are grounds to fear he will not be able to deploy the community’s best analysts to his NIE drafting team, and grounds to wonder whether this report is headed straight for the round file.
Meanwhile the American people have been treated to a sorry spectacle: a president who fiddles while Baghdad burns, playing the politics of intelligence to avoid judgments embarrassing to his policy proclivities. And again, as in the run-up to this disastrous war, senators have had to step in to demand that the U.S. intelligence system be asked to provide the information that the president should have been requiring as a matter of course. The system is not broken because of "intelligence failures" at the CIA but because George Bush wants to fiddle. His insistence on dealing with the world as he imagines it rather than the one that really exists is the root cause, not only for what is happening in Iraq, but for much else as well.
During the weeks of the 2004 presidential campaign, when the then-current Iraq NIE was the subject of public comment, George Bush was invoking his predecessor Harry Truman at every campaign stop, posturing himself as the heroic figure following in the footsteps of a great man. But Truman proudly exhibited a sign in his office that declared “The Buck Stops Here.” Bush’s evasions are a twisted reflection of that. The responsibility for what is happening now lies squarely on the desk in Bush’s Oval Office.
