The Bottom Line:
The intelligence professionals on the ground are not to
blame for the past decade of intelligence oversight, or the resulting disasters.
Watching
the most recent democratic debate, it seemed that much of what was discussed in
the foreign policy section was the need to “improve the intelligence on the
ground.” This is a belief that seems to be shared by most candidates on both
sides of the isle, not to mention a sizable portion of the American people.
What the vast majority of these people fail to understand is that the people
preforming intelligence operations and analysis on the ground aren’t the ones
making misleading claims about weapons of mass destruction or missing the next
big terrorist attack. The people making those claims are politicians who cherry-pick
speculative and preliminary intelligence reports for politically advantageous
conclusions. The intelligence professionals on the ground are preforming the equivalent
of emergency room triage in an effort to predict and prevent attacks on troops
and civilians. They look only at local incidents, patterns of attack, and
identifying the individuals committing these attacks, in an effort to prevent
as much bloodshed as possible.
The irony is, even though it is not
their job to predict massive events like the rise of ISIS, the intense
understanding of the situation on the ground they develop in the course of
their work equips them to do just that. They quickly develop an understanding
of how our actions affect things on a larger scale. These insights are not
however, sought by the higher levels of the government, because the vast majority
of them would make horrible talking points in a debate. For example, in 2013 I
spoke with a veteran intelligence analyst who predicted, in startling detail,
the rise of ISIS. He was far from the only person in the intelligence community
predicting this outcome, including analysts who have been predicting our
current situation since before we invaded Iraq. For anyone who has studied the
region as intensely as the vast majority of these veteran analysts have, the
outcome was predictable. We installed a government in Iraq that was supposed to
be all inclusive, and failed to hold it to that standard. This resulted in breeding
resentment among even the moderate Sunni people in the country, who felt
betrayed by our promise that we would give everyone a seat at the table. Then,
when the Syrian civil war broke out, it opened a window for extremists to
capitalize on that resentment, resulting in our current situation. Do not be
fooled by politicians who need a scapegoat for a war coming back to bite them
in the ass. Every level of the intelligence community was well aware of this
likely sequence of events. And do not believe for a second this assessment somehow
never managed to cross the desk of the people responsible for these horrible
events. They just weren’t what they wanted to hear, or what the American people
wanted to hear.
So my response to the candidates,
and the American people who have lost faith in the intelligence on the ground,
would be to pay attention to what the intelligence community as a whole is
saying rather than a small minority. And, to do what any credible analyst does
before making a recommendation, verify that information from multiple sources.
