Wednesday, December 5, 2007
Iran and American Intelligence
In probably the biggest news item of the week, the US government now thinks that Iran has stopped its nuclear program. Going back to our discussion recently about bureaucracy, hopefully this is a good sign that the Bush administration has succeeded in reforming the intelligence services. The 9/11 Commission Report makes it pretty clear that the US intelligence network needed help to prevent a similar attack. The Bush Administration changed the intelligence bureaucracy to make the agencies work together better. However, as the horribly incorrect intelligence before the Iraq invasion showed, American intelligence still had problems. Hopefully, the intelligence services woke up after both 9/11 and Iraq. This new intelligence report about Iran may (although it could still happen) have saved us from fighting another costly war based on bad intelligence.
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2 comments:
Unless the intelligence is still faulty, showing that a nuclear program doesn't exist when in reality it does, instead of the other way around. And there is still the fact that this intelligence is essentially four years old.
With Ahmadinejad's constant belligerant attitude towards the West and his expressed goal of doing whatever he can to increase the power of Iran, I find it hard to believe that he is not in some way working to develop a nuclear bomb, which would bring his country so much power and prestige. Unless the Alatollah put his foot down on the issue, which is a possiblity.
Actually in regards to the fallibility of the U.S. intelligence in the run up to the Iraq War, I would hold the Bush administration responsible for stifling opposition in the intelligence community. I am pretty certain that the National Security Document provided by the State Department was unambiguously dubious, even critical about many of the CIA's claims of Sadaam's WMD. I would argue that this represents a larger failure in the American system--the failure of the intelligence establishment but also that of congress and the senate for their sin of omission, for not carefully reading all of the intelligence that was presented from other agencies, such as the State Department. Yes, there were problems. But if we want to use Iraq as a textbook example of failed intelligence, then we should consider some of the the nuance about how the intelligence became so polarized.
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