I think it’s important to realize that Bush Administration officials don’t believe that politicizing intelligence is wrong. I’m not saying you’re doing this, we, but a lot of blogosphere commentary on cooked intel carries a sense that if we can just expose it, they’ll be forced to change. I didn’t fully realize it myself until recently.

Porter Goss openly declared that there wasn’t enough politicization of intelligence, and that he was going to make clear to the Agency that their job was to produce intelligence to support administration policy. Not to guide it, not to form it, but to support it.

Their resistance to rational thought goes way beyond their attacks on science. They know what’s right, they’re just as smart as any â€expert,†and knowledge and experience means nothing. Experts are just another opinion, so anyone who presents information they don’t like can’t be reporting reality, they must have an agenda or secretly be a Democrat. The one constant is that they’re always right, and no matter how bad things are now, if we just keep going, everyone will see that they were right all along. Rational people can see the cliff up ahead, but their map doesn’t show a cliff, and we’re heading straight toward that green valley beyond, so it’s okay.

A bit more directly on-topic, I hope top Democrats will reassure the intelligence community that they’re not going to blame them for not producing an NIE, that they understand that without an opposition forcing them, the administration would just leak the parts they like and ignore the parts they don’t.

Negroponte is a known thug, but I’ve gotten the impression that he is not a neocon fool. My take on this is purely cynical – he isn’t going to waste time on intel assessments that wouldn’t be read anyway.

And, as the peeling off of some Republicans shows, anyone capable of absorbing a realistic assessment doesn’t need it. Only the willfully delusional don’t understand by now that Iraq is a shambles, and steadily becoming more of one.

I think that, given the growing intraparty dissent on the Iraq issue, an NIE that reflected the current state of Iraq would be a severe blow for the administration’s staunch supporters, especially if it came out this year. At the very least, expect such a document to be put off until early next year, so that it can blow over by the next election cycle.

Or maybe they just want to get another new PM in place in Iraq first, since the present one is now supporting Hezbollah against Israel.

Maybe the Gosslings were writing a NIE and now it is back to square one.
Maybe Negroponte best understands militia as a way of governance; city-state it used to be called. If the Republicans win the 2008 White House, he buys yet more time. If a Democratic executive branch ensues in 2008, the plan likely is to transfer power to the Dems but with a lot of remedial work, so that by 2012 the Dems will be emerging from the thicket of backlogged unaccomplished projects to exit a stable Iraq; but the problem handed to the Dems should be of such proportions that even with prodigous effort on the Dems’ part, the public still could be convinced in the 2012 campaign that the reconstruction and pacification were mismanaged by Dems. The two parties seem to do this all the time, in other spheres of activity; there is correlation between political cycle and business cycle. And, worse, the Democrats used to be the war party; glad that part of history passed.

emptywheel,

I disagree. We did not go to war because of the IC’s failures. We went to war because the Administration made explicit political decisions to ignore expertise. The facts were indeed fixed around the policy. The idea that if the IC had just stood up to the political pressure coming from the White House we could have avoided this debacle is naive. This administration, with specific intent, perverted the intelligence process to ensure a particular outcome. Even then, they needed the extra push of active Italian and Iranian disinformation campaigns waged against the Iraqi government to achieve their desired outcome. I’m not implying that there was any collusion between those three efforts, but they were all aimed at instigating an American attack against Iraq on false pretenses.

I think this is worth mentioning in the current discussion because the absence of an NIE is a symptom, not a cause. Based on how the 2002 Iraq NIE was used, or I should say abused, by the administration, I think we can assume that having an NIE prepared now would have zero impact on our Iraq policy.

William,

THere was some of both that went on. The DOE case I mention is a clear instance of an agency caving. It’s clear that the aluminum myth largely came out of a careerist–if not neoconist–WINPAC analyst. If those two things hadn’t happened, the Administration would have remained where it was in the first week of September 2002, with even Republicans (like Trent Lott) unwilling to support war.

But then there was the case of OSP which was absolutely a case of perverting the process.

THe NIE wouldn’t have been usable in the way the Administration wanted to if it weren’t for some people caving.

I agree with this diary 100%, because those responsible to prevent the â€cherry picking†of intelligence either caved in or drank the â€Kool-Aid.†The problem with Iraq although a wrong decision to begin with is compounded by the fact there is not enough â€reserve†ground troops. When American troops stormed Ramadi and fighting started in Mosul, the Army shifted troops from Ramadi to goto Mosul. While Israel is trying to disarm Hezbollah…no one is diarming Al-Sadr militia in Iraq. (why?). So the only logical decision is for American troops to withdraw from Iraq.

As for Negroponte..you can only hide your head in the sand for so long.

Just came across this quote regarding the October 2002 NIE:

A senior intelligence official said the White House preferred to avoid a National Intelligence Estimate, a formal review of competing evidence and judgments, because it knew â€there were disagreements over details in almost every aspect of the administration’s case against Iraq.†The president’s advisers, the official said, did not want â€a lot of footnotes and disclaimers.â€