Date: Fri, 3 Oct 2014 21:20:14 +0200
Who's to Blame for ISIS 'Surprise'?
For several years, Official Washington blinded itself to the growing
radicalism of the Syrian opposition, all the better to portray the Assad
regime as the "bad guys" and the rebels as the "good guys." Now, everyone is
pointing fingers about the ISIS "surprise," as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar
explains.
By Paul R. Pillar
October 3, 2014
The recent burst of recriminations about what the U.S. intelligence
community did or did not tell the President of the United States in advance
about the rise of the extremist group sometimes called ISIS, and about
associated events in Iraq, is only a variation on some well-established
tendencies in Washington discourse. The tendency that in recent years has,
of course, become especially strongly entrenched is that of couching any
issue in the way that is best designed to bash one's political opponents.
For those determined to bash and frustrate Barack Obama at every turn, it is
a tendency that trumps everything else. Thus we now have the curious
circumstance of some of Mr. Obama's Republican critics, who in other
contexts would be at least as quick as anyone else to come down on U.S.
intelligence agencies (and most other parts of the federal bureaucracy) like
a ton of bricks, saying that the President got good information but failed
to act on it. (Some critics, however, have tried to lower their cognitive
dissonance by saying that "everyone" could see what was coming with ISIS.)
Relationships between the intelligence community and presidential
administrations over the past few decades have not fallen into any
particular pattern distinguishable by party. One of the best relationships
was with the administration of the elder George Bush - perhaps not
surprisingly, given that president's prior experience as a Director of
Central Intelligence under President Gerald Ford.Probably the worst was
during the presidency of the younger George Bush, whose administration - in
<http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-U-S-Foreign-Policy-Misguided/dp/02311579
24> the course of selling the Iraq War - strove to discredit the
intelligence community's judgments that contradicted the administration's
assertions about an alliance between Iraq and al-Qaeda, pushed for public
use of reporting about alleged weapons programs that the community did not
consider credible, and ignored the community's judgments about the likely
mess in Iraq that would follow the ouster of Saddam Hussein's regime.
Relations also have varied under Democratic presidents. Mr. Obama, given the
evidently deliberate and methodical way he weighs input, including from the
civilian and military bureaucracy, before major national security decisions,
probably has been one of the better users of intelligence, at least in the
sense of paying attention to it. His
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/president-obama-60-minutes/> remark on 60
Minutes that led to the accusations about ISIS, however, did sound like
gratuitous blame-shifting.
One very longstanding and bipartisan tendency that this recent imbroglio has
diluted (because the political motive to attack Obama is even stronger than
political motives to attack intelligence agencies) is to assume that any
apparently insufficient U.S. reaction to an untoward development overseas
must be due to policymakers not being sufficiently informed, and this must
be because intelligence services failed.
It is remarkable how, when anything disturbing goes bump in the night
overseas, the label "intelligence failure" gets quickly and automatically
applied by those who have no basis whatever for knowing what the
intelligence community did or did not say - in classified,
intra-governmental channels - to policymakers.
The current case does demonstrate in undiluted form, however, several other
recurrent tendencies, one of which is to affix the label "surprise" to
certain events not so much because of the state of knowledge or
understanding of those who make national security policy but more because
we, the public - and the press and chattering class - were surprised.
Or to be even more accurate, this often happens because those of us outside
government weren't paying much attention to the developments in question
until something especially dramatic seized our attention, even though we
actually had enough information about the possibilities that we should not
have been surprised. Thus the dramatic gains by ISIS earlier this year have
been labeled a "surprise" because a swift territorial advance and gruesome
videotaped killings grabbed public attention.
Another tendency is to believe that if government is working properly,
surprises shouldn't happen. This belief disregards how much that is relevant
to foreign policy and national security is unknowable, no matter how
brilliant either an intelligence service or a policymaker may be.
This is partly because of other countries and entities keeping secrets but
even more so because some future events are inherently unpredictable - given
that they involve decisions that others have not yet made, or social
processes too complex or psychological mechanisms too fickle to model.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was referring to this
epistemological reality in the comment that he made recently about the Iraqi
army's collapse and that the President erroneously characterized in his 60
Minutes interview. Clapper was not saying that the intelligence community
messed up on this question; he instead was observing that this type of
sudden loss of will in the heat of battle has always been unpredictable.
Yet another recurring tendency is to think that proper policy responses
always flow from a good empirical understanding of the problem at hand,
including the sort of information, analysis, and predictions that a
well-functioning intelligence service might be expected to provide. In fact,
proper responses often do not flow that way from an understanding of the
problem. Often there are conflicting national interests at stake, there are
serious costs and risks to possible responses, and the likely benefits of
responses may not outweigh the likely costs.
No matter how accurate a picture of ISIS the intelligence community may be
providing to the President and his policy advisers, that picture is not
likely to constitute a case for the United States to take more, rather than
less, forceful action in Syria or Iraq. If President Obama is now taking
more forceful measures in those places than he was earlier, it is neither
because he is belatedly reacting to good intelligence nor because the
intelligence community is belatedly getting its judgments right, but instead
because
<http://nationalinterest.org/blog/paul-pillar/we-have-met-the-source-questio
nable-strategy-he-us-11279> he is responding to how the rest of us have
decided that we are not just surprised but alarmed by ISIS.
Paul R. Pillar, in his 28 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, rose to
be one of the agency's top analysts. He is now a visiting professor at
Georgetown University for security studies.
<http://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Cia-lobby-seal.jpg>
CIA seal in lobby of the spy agency's headquarters. (U.S. government photo)
CIA seal in lobby of the spy agency's headquarters. (U.S. government photo)
(image/jpeg attachment: image001.jpg)