For those looking for my reflections on Remembrance Day, go here.
Moving on…
There have been reports that Vice President Dick Cheney worked to suppress a National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iran because it contains “dissenting judgments on the Iranian nuclear programme” that would complicate the administration’s position on the use of force. According to the Inter Press Service…
“A National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran has been held up for more than a year in an effort to force the intelligence community to remove dissenting judgments on the Iranian nuclear programme, and thus make the document more supportive of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney’s militarily aggressive policy toward Iran, according to accounts of the process provided by participants to two former Central Intelligence Agency officers.
But this pressure on intelligence analysts, obviously instigated by Cheney himself, has not produced a draft estimate without those dissenting views, these sources say. The White House has now apparently decided to release the unsatisfactory draft NIE, but without making its key findings public.
A former CIA intelligence officer who has asked not to be identified told IPS that an official involved in the NIE process says the Iran estimate was ready to be published a year ago but has been delayed because the director of national intelligence wanted a draft reflecting a consensus on key conclusions — particularly on Iran’s nuclear programme.”
President Bush has, of course, been playing both sides with regards to the subject. On the one hand, he recently employed the term “World War Three” with regards to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. On the other, he has pledged that he will use diplomatic means to isolate Iran, a position reaffirmed recently during a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The move shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.
Following the Gulf War, the same tactic was used to try and isolate the regime of Saddam Hussein and create conditions within Iraq that would foster widespread dissent and ultimately result in the regime’s overthrow – or so the West thought. Ultimately, it ended up plummeting the country into abject poverty, produced the oil for food scandal, and created such a disparaged state of affairs that over 1 million Iraqis would perish during the period in which the sanctions were in affect.
But unlike Iraq, the Iranians have two aces up their sleeves – the Russians and the Chinese, both of whom do business with Iran, both of whom are permanent Security Council members, and both of whom have, to this point, not backed the West’s position.
It is also important to remember something else regarding Iran and US intelligence within the country itself. In James Risen’s State Of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, Risen details a mistake made by an individual at the CIA who, by accident, sent a message via Blackberry to one of the CIA’s operatives in Iran that accidentally included an entire list of US operatives in the country. The individual that received the message was, as it turned out, playing both sides, handed over the information, and in 2004 the CIA’s entire network in Iran was ‘rolled up’. Therefore, they have only had three, perhaps four, years to reconstitute the network, an undertaking that is difficult at the best of times, and one that when done expediently, especially given the suspicious conditions produced since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, must lead one to seriously question the accuracy of intelligence received from new operatives or connections within Iran.
When one examines the sources relied upon prior to the invasion of Iraq, such as Ahmed Chalabi and the notorious ‘Curveball’, it’s easy to see how a lack of real intelligence can lead to a prolonged disaster when those wishing to take action are blinded by their own desires. If the invasion and occupation of Iraq has taught us anything it’s that the intelligence used to justify military action was so diluted that to claim that the war wasn’t engineered by hard-line elements within the Bush administration is, at this point, utter madness.