An investigation into the Iraq war intelligence

Well, I'm sure he's hoping that the demands and contentiousness of an election year will help keep any damaging information from being made public until sometime after November 8th, but President Bush has finally agreed to a bipartisan, independent investigation into the intelligence failures that led the administration, at least, to believe that war in Iraq was necessary. He really had very little choice in the matter, though. There has been growing pressure for such an investigation as the war continues to drag on, casualties continue to mount and the supposed stockpiles of WMD continue to be unlocatable.

The AP reports that the commission will be set up along the lines of the Warren commission that investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

By setting up the investigation himself, Bush will have greater control over its membership and mandate.

[...]

In appointing the members, Bush will draw heavily from intelligence experts who are familiar with the problems in the field, the White House official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. The investigation will be independent and be provided with the resources it needs to do its job, the official said.

Its mandate will be broader than simply what went wrong in Iraq, the official said. It also will look into issues such as gathering intelligence on stateless regimes, such as al-Qaida, and weapons proliferation.

At this point, the White House has not decided on a deadline for the investigation — a sensitive issue since its findings could become an issue in the presidential campaign which will be decided with the election in November.

There was no indication when Bush would sign the order creating the panel.

In the comments that have been made so far by the administration, it sounds like they are hoping to be able to lay the blame for the intelligence failures on the CIA. While I have no doubt that there are a number of issues where the CIA will have to explain their actions (or lack thereof) and analysis, the investigation should take particular note of the Department of Defense's Office of Special Plans.

The Pentagon's innocuously named Office of Special Plans served as a unique, handpicked group of hawkish defense officials who worked outside regular intelligence channels. According to the Department of Defense, the group was first created in the aftermath of Sept. 11 to supplement the war on terrorism; it was designed to sift through all the intelligence on terrorist activity, and to focus particularly on various al-Qaida links. By last fall it was focusing almost exclusively on Iraq, and often leaking doomsday findings about Saddam's regime. Those controversial conclusions are now fueling the suspicion that the obscure agency, propelled by ideology, manipulated key findings in order to fit the White House's desire to wage war with Iraq.

"Everything we've seen since the war has confirmed intelligence community suspicions about its [the Office of Special Plans'] sources of information," says Greg Thielmann, who ran military assessments at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research until he retired in October. "The rosy assumption about troops being greeted with flowers and hugs -- that came from that stream of intelligence. The assurance that they knew exactly where the weapons of mass destruction were, or that Iraq was ready to employ chemical and biological weapons in battle within 45 minutes of an order -- all of those stories have proven wrong."

I would love to be able to say that maybe Bush has realized that going to war on a false pretext is a grave error that needs to be thoroughly investigated so that we can avoid making the same mistake in the future, but I've been paying too much attention over the last 3 years to think that. Bush is undoubtedly hoping that by agreeing to the investigation, he can silence those criticizing him for not "doing" anything about the intelligence failures, and that the amount of time it will take to put a commission together, work out the rules under which it will operate, and let the commission members get organized and ready to really dig in to the meat of the issue will be sufficient for it to prevent any "bombshells" coming out of the investigation that might possibly dampen Bush's chances for re-election. He's not looking for answers. He's looking for a way to pre-empt criticism of how he's handled the war.

Still, there is a chance that we may actually learn something from the comission, and if so, that, at least, will be a positive result.

Posted by thorswitch at February 2, 2004 12:51 AM | TrackBack