Worse than Pearl Harbor?

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Military intelligence suffers from two distinct types of diagnostic flaws: a false negative and a false positive. The former is a failure to perceive an imminent threat. The latter is the failure to perceive the absence of an imminent threat to the extent that a false sense of doom drives the political process. The reasons for both failures run deeper than a mere lack of organizational structure. They derive from a culture of haughty hubris that fails to perceive the viciousness within the military machinery.

In her memoir, Condoleezza Rice reveals how she embodies this hubris as she ignores the errors of her own decision making process. She artfully covers her own posterior with an upside-down description of the intelligence failure that inflated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Her approach resembles the tack taken by a crook who has been caught and presented with only a fraction of the evidence available to the prosecutor. Yes, it was a mistake to mislead Americans into thinking that Iraq had a stockpile of nuclear bombs or that it was working toward that goal, but it was not Rice's mistake. It came from a failure within the intelligence community. What was needed was not a prosecution of the culprits, but a bureaucratic restructuring of how intelligence is processed. As with Pearl Harbor, the information was there, but it was not processed well. Adding another layer of bone-headed bureaucracy was sure to cure the problem.

Rice insists that the bits and pieces of intelligence shown to be misleading belied the vast body of intelligence that demonstrated a threat. What she fails to grasp (or at least, to present) was the fact that the body of intelligence pointed not to a threat on the part of Iraq, but to a deliberate campaign of threat inflation and disinformation on the part of domestic ideologues and Iraqi exiles who sought to rationalize their urge to dominate Iraq. No amount of bureaucratic tinkering can fix the problem of criminal negligence. Rice was a member of that crew despite her attempt to distance herself from them for the benefit of the public broadcast audience.

More people suffered from the orgy of brutality that ensued as a result of the Iraq WMD intelligence failure than suffered from the failure to defend Pearl Harbor. It was a failure whose consequences will not be fully felt and fully fathomed for generations to come. By spinning the event as positive, Rice does a disservice to herself and the world in which she lives.

What do you think of Rice's attempts to sway the opinion of her more cultured critics?

Comments

[squidb0i.livejournal.com]

+1

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

OK, let's be blunt here: the Roosevelt Administration expected *if* Japan chose to attack as opposed to stop its China war that it would attack the Phillippines, Guam, and Wake. Well, it did attack all of those places on 7 December. The problem was that Japan did all this and attacked over an entire ocean with all of its aircraft carriers concentrated into one force. They weren't wrong to predict a Japanese attack where they actually attacked, they were wrong to miss that Japan was going to do that *and* Pearl Harbor. This is not comparable at all to 2003.

[squidb0i.livejournal.com]

+1

[paedraggaidin.livejournal.com]

Yep, this.

And had our carriers been at Pearl, like the Japanese reasonably expected them to be, it probably would have been a very different (and far shorter) war.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Different, yes, shorter, no. The Japanese didn't hit our fuel dumps there, and even if they had done so, the production from the Two-Ocean Navy Act of 1940 alone was sufficient to swamp the Japanese in superior US production in terms of quality and quantity. Too, the European war wouldn't really change unless the Japanese victories that followed that would have been on a scale sufficient to disrupt Lend-Lease to the USSR (meaning Japan would have had to forego its neutrality pact with the USSR beforehand, and even Japanese leaders didn't think that would be possible) the question is more "How much of Europe will the Soviets occupy before the Allies land troops there?" as opposed to "Oh shit, the Axis are going to win this thing."

[squidb0i.livejournal.com]

"It came from a failure within the intelligence community."

No, that's her excuse. The intelligence as presented was sculpted toward achieving a political goal by Cheney, et al.

The failure...

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

... was in allowing Cheney, et al to fabricate an inflated threat. No self-respecting intelligence organization would have allowed itself to be used in this fashion.

Re: The failure...

[squidb0i.livejournal.com]

Agreed.

Re: The failure...

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

I love how this continues to be asserted with nothing concrete to support it.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

^Precisely. What's even dumber about that are two things: 1) The CIA explicitly told them what they wanted was not there, hence the Valerie Plame incident, and 2) they trusted exiles about the political situation of a regime that exiled them and how popular they'd be. That's invasion 101, always verify and distrust what people exiled from a country tell you *before* invading it. Bush's invasion of Iraq may well do for lessons for the future of how not to invade and occupy a particular state. And his foreign policy also serves as a grand example of the law of unintended consequences, as he was the best thing to happen to the Ayatollah's regime since the Iraqi invasion in 1980.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

Lots of stuff went into it. Rumsfeld was agitating and feeling in the dark about Afghanistan, and wanted the DoD to take a prominent role in the "war on terror" and Afghanistan wasn't the place to have a nice big war. The ideological underpinnings, of course, fed into the foreign policy of exporting democracy. The CIA, for its part, had already passed over the old intel that the Administration drudged up again.

Condi was really too small-fry to have much of any role in the reasons behind Iraq. She was the National Security Advisor which is an important position, but the cabinet politics of SecDef, VP and SecState dominated everything. She was just tagging along.

What do you think of Rice's attempts to sway the opinion of her more cultured critics?
I don't know. I think maybe she's trying to sound more important than she was. The driving logic behind the Bush Administration was the power fights between Rummy, Cheney and various bureaucratic strongholds which vied for power and prestige beneath the sleepy eyes of a President who lacked the force of personality to control his shit.

Other insiders...

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

... have reported on Rice's role in promoting a climate of the fear of a "mushroom cloud" from Iraq. Her reputation as a principal belligerent is not unwarranted.

[montecristo.livejournal.com]

If you think the problem is merely one of finding the "right operator" to get the desired behavior out of this ridiculous Rube Goldberg government then I want some of what you're smoking.

[mrbogey.livejournal.com]

Rice wasn't MI. She was NSA.

Also there's more than two distinct ways to have a diagnostic flaw in interpretting data.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Case in point: trusting Chalabi on anything to do with domestic Iraqi politics without remotely considering possibilities in case he was lying or over-optimistic, compounding this with disbanding the Iraqi Army (and then comparing this to MacArthur and West Germany leaving aside that people did *not* de-Axis those societies for precisely the reason of avoiding what happened here), and most egregiously ignoring generals who warned the force allotted was too small and too cheaply supplied with things like body armor in a war that saw things like IEDs and irregular attacks that made body armor even more relevant than otherwise.

Bush didn't just screw up the occupation bit, the whole idea seems like somebody decided to teach a bunch of object lessons about how not to wage war.

Rice...

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

... discusses the topic in her memoir. As an adviser to the president, she was a consumer of intelligence. She did not seem particular miffed that the product that she received was horribly flawed.

[404.livejournal.com]

You're still harping on Condi's memoirs? Guess you have nothing better to do with your time...

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Yes, she should quit dicking around the Bush and discuss either Cheney or Bush's memoirs for a change.

Au contraire...

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

... I have many better things to do with my time and I do them. Don't feel bad that I share them with a different audience.

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

I've got an even better idea for an easy way to kill time: go around forums and snark at people.

Oh wait. You're already onto it. Well done then!

[montecristo.livejournal.com]

The reasons for both failures run deeper than a mere lack of organizational structure. They derive from a culture of haughty hubris that fails to perceive the viciousness within the military machinery.

So, would you have us believe that all that is necessary to rectify the problem is to change the intelligence community's culture? I disagree. I assert that the problem is systemic, and not a superficial artifact of "culture."

In a bureaucracy with civil-service guaranteed job security it is more important to the jobs of the majority not to be in a position to be blamed than it is to accomplish the organization's purpose by taking individual initiative. There is a penalty for taking the wrong action; there is little reward for taking right action. There is continued survival in one's job merely for not taking wrong action. This goes right to the nature of bureacracy, and is not a problem with some of the individuals serving it.

There is no limit to how much safety is worth when one is spending someone else's money.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

Are you trying to tell me that Pepsi is superior product? Seriously? Well I disagree.

Coke is a superior soft drink for my needs. ~Michael Jordan, 1989, Coca-Cola advertisement.

No magic bullet.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

I do not propose a change in culture. If anything, I would propose prosecution of the criminal element. Bureaucrats commit fewer crimes when they fear reprisals.