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Jan. 22nd, 2004 04:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
winterbadgerfrom Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong
If Mr Pollack and his sources are correct, the problem (at least at the policy end--Pollack discusses many other interesting possible contributions to the "WMD Gap" in Iraq) really was the "honest" belief of those in the Administration that Iraq was "the root of all evil" in Middle East affairs and acted both passively and actively to shape intelligence to fit that preconception. It would not be the first time a government refused to believe intelligence findings that did not square with its view of the world (Stalin's refusal to accept that Germany intended to invade the Soviet Union in 1941 springs to mind), but I have to confess to a chuckle of amusement at the irony of the intelligence community, which many of my friends regard with hostility and suspicion as a tool of the Man, being dismissed as a bunch of "left-leaning cultural relativists" by the Man Embodied (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Rice, Powell, et al.)
Throughout the spring and fall of 2002 and well into 2003 I received numerous complaints from friends and colleagues in the intelligence community, and from people in the policy community, about precisely that. According to them, many Administration officials reacted strongly, negatively, and aggressively when presented with information or analysis that contradicted what they already believed about Iraq. Many of these officials believed that Saddam Hussein was the source of virtually all the problems in the Middle East and was an imminent danger to the United States because of his perceived possession of weapons of mass destruction and support of terrorism. Many also believed that CIA analysts tended to be left-leaning cultural relativists who consistently downplayed threats to the United States. They believed that the Agency, not the Administration, was biased, and that they were acting simply to correct that bias.
If Mr Pollack and his sources are correct, the problem (at least at the policy end--Pollack discusses many other interesting possible contributions to the "WMD Gap" in Iraq) really was the "honest" belief of those in the Administration that Iraq was "the root of all evil" in Middle East affairs and acted both passively and actively to shape intelligence to fit that preconception. It would not be the first time a government refused to believe intelligence findings that did not square with its view of the world (Stalin's refusal to accept that Germany intended to invade the Soviet Union in 1941 springs to mind), but I have to confess to a chuckle of amusement at the irony of the intelligence community, which many of my friends regard with hostility and suspicion as a tool of the Man, being dismissed as a bunch of "left-leaning cultural relativists" by the Man Embodied (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Rice, Powell, et al.)
