After months of internal wrangling, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its latest report on prewar intelligence on Iraq. This new report covers assessments of what we should have expected, both inside and outside of Iraq, once Saddam was removed from power. To call the committee’s effort mediocre would be an injustice to mediocrity everywhere.
The report pales in comparison with the committee’s first review of prewar intelligence, completed in July 2004, which examined why U.S. intelligence was so far off the mark on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. That report reflected a serious investigative effort, with a body of analysis that provided a road map of sorts for improving intelligence in the future. Other than scoring political points for the new Democratic Senate majority against the administration, the new report offers few if any real lessons.
Although it is 226 pages long, the new report consists mainly of a simple reprint of two key documents, along with their lengthy internal distribution lists. They are “Regional Consequences of Regime Change in Iraq” and “Principal Challenges in Post-Saddam Iraq,” both issued in January 2003 by the National Intelligence Council, the intelligence community’s college of analytic cardinals. The Intelligence Committee’s own “conclusions” run to just seven pages and amount to little more than snippets from the two NIC documents.
The real conclusion–implicit in the who’s who of administration officials on the distribution list and made explicit in the “additional views” set out by Chairman Jay Rockefeller and three other Democratic senators–is that if only senior policymakers had listened to the “cautionary judgments” of the intelligence community before the war, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in today. By ignoring those predictions, “the Bush Administration once again demonstrated its practice of cherry-picking intelligence reports and assessments that supported policy objectives and denigrating or dismissing those which did not.” Along with “other missteps,” this practice, they conclude, has produced “increased violence in Iraq, a resurgent al-Qa’ida in Afghanistan, and a worsening spread of anti-American extremism around the world.”
Truth be told, the committee’s majority does a bit of cherry-picking of its own. The two NIC documents, which in theory reflected a consensus view across the intelligence community, are a mix of mostly conventional analysis of Iraq and the region. Based not on hard intelligence but on in-house regional expertise, the documents, as one might expect from a largely speculative effort, got some things right and others not.
Moreover, the NIC analysts recognized that developments in Iraq would greatly depend on what the United States and the Coalition actually did there after they overthrew Saddam. Decisions made in Washington, the NIC noted, would have a “dominant influence” on how things turned out. Ignoring this in its conclusions, the Intelligence Committee straight-lines it from the NIC’s discussion of possible problems to today’s situation–as if the botched occupation of Iraq had never happened.
What the committee highlights from the two reports is its cautions: that establishing a democracy in Iraq would be a hard slog; that the region would be in turmoil and the example of Iraq would do little or nothing to promote reforms elsewhere or to slow WMD programs in other countries; that al Qaeda would use the war to accelerate its terrorist activities and, while we were distracted, reestablish itself in Afghanistan; that a deeply divided Iraqi society would engage in sectarian violence, with Shia reprisal killings likely; and that rogue ex-regime elements could forge an alliance with terrorist organizations or independently engage in guerrilla warfare against Coalition forces or the new Iraqi government.
Certainly, it is true that establishing democracy in Iraq will take time. That said, it actually hasn’t been the case that Iraqis have spurned democracy. Given how beaten down civil society and politics were by the Baathist regime, and how extreme the security problems facing Iraqis since Saddam’s removal have been, the democratic process has been surprisingly resilient. There has been little or no “backsliding into Iraq’s tradition of authoritarianism,” as the NIC suggested might happen.
As for the region, the NIC analysis is not exactly what the committee has put forward. First, on the regional implications of Saddam’s removal, the NIC starts by predicting an immediately inflamed “Arab street”; it asserts that a long-term occupation of Iraq by the United States would lead to violent demonstrations; and it foresees terrorism initially spiking, then declining slowly over five years. Again, if anything, it is noteworthy how quiet the Arab street was in the wake of Saddam’s fall. Moreover, while the demonstration effect of removing Saddam has been wasted by the botched occupation, it did initially give momentum to the reform agenda in a number of Middle Eastern states. Nor is it true that it had no impact on the region’s WMD programs. While Iran took the lesson that it had better speed up its nuclear program, Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi heard a different message. In short, while anti-Americanism is on the rise, it is also the case that Arabs and Arab states took note of America’s exercise of power, and not all their reactions were negative. The great tragedy is that the administration failed to capitalize on that fact, not that it ignored the conventional predictions of doom and gloom laid out by the NIC.
As for al Qaeda, it has, indeed, moved into Iraq. But it has not struck at the United States globally, as the NIC predicted it would, nor has it used the distraction of Iraq to return to Afghanistan in any substantial way, as the intelligence report suggested might happen and as the Intelligence Committee assumes has happened. There are no al Qaeda camps or training sites in Afghanistan today. The committee seems to confuse the Taliban with al Qaeda.
Finally, the headline news from the report was the supposed prediction by the intelligence community that sectarian violence would erupt in the wake of a U.S. invasion, Shiites would engage in bloody reprisals against Sunnis, and the dead-enders from Saddam’s regime would turn to guerrilla war. Yet, as the NIC analysis also notes, this “violent conflict” between Iraqi groups would occur “unless an occupying force prevented them from doing so.”
In short, the sectarian killings we have seen over the past year were not inevitable. To the contrary, until the al Qaeda attack on the Shia mosque in Samara in early 2006, it was quite striking how little Shias struck back at the Iraqi Sunni community. And contrary to the potential bloody “score-settling” predicted by the NIC in the wake of Saddam’s fall, the Shia, under the leadership of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, kept sectarian violence to a minimum.
Finally, the prediction that Saddam loyalists might resort to guerrilla warfare was no great insight: No one should have expected the Sunnis to assume minority status quietly. Yet the authors of the NIC report did not highlight this among their “key judgments” about the challenges to be faced in post-Saddam Iraq. Indeed, far from flagging this danger for policymakers, the authors don’t bring it up until the very last lines of the report.
Of course, given how poorly Iraq has been handled, Monday morning quarterbacking is easy and to be expected. But while we’re at it, why hasn’t the Intelligence Committee, or any other oversight body, looked into the failure of the CIA’s supposed contacts in the Iraqi army and government to come over to the Coalition once the war began, as the agency told military planners would happen? Cobra II, the account of the run-up to the war by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, makes clear that Rumsfeld, Franks, and company dropped the ball when it came to planning for the occupation. But, as they also document, the expectation of having a usable Iraqi police force and army to hold things together after Baghdad fell was fueled by CIA reports that whole police units and Iraqi army divisions were likely to flip.
If the Senate committee wants to do something useful, it should report to the country whether the intelligence agency that had no assets inside al Qaeda before 9/11, no assets of note in Iraq before the first Gulf war, and no assets of note in Iraq before the second, has fixed that problem. Given our surprise at the advances in Iran’s nuclear program announced this past month by the International Atomic Energy Agency, a great deal of work apparently remains to be done.
Gary Schmitt is director of the American Enterprise Institute’s program on advanced strategic studies.
