Pre-War Iraq Intelligence

The current controversy over the quality, sources, and purposes of the pre-war "intelligence" that wrongly linked Iraq and al-Qaeda does nothing to change my original assessment. The United States spends thirty or forty billion dollars a year on spying. A portion of this is used to prevent criminal acts, and I consider it police work rather than espionage. It is the latter that I regard as useless.

Advances in research are made by professionals, mostly working in universities, due to the process of peer review and an insistence on replicability. This is the basis for quality assurance. A single piece of research is checked for such things as inappropriate research methods or simple errors in analysis, and all research is regarded as no more than a piece of the puzzle. The puzzle, whatever it is, is gradually solved to the satisfaction of the participants by an accumulation of evidence from assorted sources. Or not. Sometimes, as we so often see in medical studies, initial studies are refuted or at least modified by later ones.

The problems of espionage are the subject of congressional hearings, closed or open, and the consensus always is that there has been some structural flaw which can be fixed by a better structure. This is not and never has been true. The problem is that espionage relies explicitly on special knowledge, from sources that cannot be verified through processes that cannot be replicated. Its quality can therefore never be relied on.

That's the problem. Not whether on any particular day, the espionage turns out to be correct, but that a nation like the United States cannot have public debates about issues when the "facts" are private. I argued at the outset of the war that the rationale was wrong for reasons that the White House could have determined for perhaps $29,999,999,999 less by buying a copy of the International Herald Tribune and reading what William Pfaff was saying. They could save a dollar more than that now by going online and checking with Juan Cole, who gets most of the information by himself going online and checking Arab newspapers and blogs.

One of my favorite lines goes "... an oxymoron, like Catholic education or military intelligence." The latter is a play on the two meanings of intelligence. The United States puts faith in the definition I've been discussing, analysis drawn from secretly obtained information. The second meaning is the ability to draw from many sources, assimilate the data, and be smart about drawing conclusions. If the United States had shown more of the latter kind of intelligence, we wouldn't be in the quagmire that we now find ourselves in.

I was just checking Google to see if any of my earlier posts showed up, and I discovered that looking for "Charles Krauthammer" and "predictable" yielded my post of four days ago, along with with many more than I had anticipated. Predictable seems to be a word that people associate frequently with the man, and that he uses himself.

There was a particularly interesting article from Charles himself, discussing reparations for African-Americans. He proposed, not entirely seriously, to trade off a payment of $440 billion to African-American families for the terminaton of affirmative action. He commented that although a steep price, it represented only a thirteenth of the projected ten-year federal surplus.

That was in April, 2001, before W. had worked his magic on the federal budget. Less than six years, but it seems so long ago.