More on the Web Powell quote from AFP article Robert Dreyfuss' article in The Nation on the Pentagon's failure to prepare any intelligence estimate on what Iraq would look like after we got to Baghdad Rolf Ekeus, former head of UNSCOM's investigation into Iraq's WMD, explains why the Bush administration can't tell the truth -- it's not that they're lying, they're married to bogus fundamental assumptions. Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article on the INC invasion plans. =========== More Short Articles Passionate anti-Semitism Ricin in the mail Poodle leaves sinking ship Army criticises Terror War strategy Iraq's WMD:  Case Closed Asymetric War in Iraq Information Operations Bad news for Bush Stripping Plame of cover Terrorists and Terrorism Experts Polycentric Iraqi Nationalism Bush flight suit mystery Thinking about the Iraqi resistance Public Baffled by Terror Alerts Normal Failures Bush in Free Fall INC and Blowback Google finds Weapons of Mass Destruction More Polls The Timothy McVeigh Finishing School Reinforcing an opinion Legitimacy Borderlands Orwellian Centenary Cognitive Dissonance Heaven and other things Polls, Polls, Polls Where are they now: Eugene Hasenfus More Mass Delusions WMD Trailers NOT NRA rules in Iraq:  Gun confiscation flops About that Anthrax... Another Fine Mess Chaos in Iraq

June 29, 2003

Warbaby says:

Organizations don't think like people.  They think like committees.  Policy and doctrine are produced by a process of negotiation and consensus.  As a result, it is fully possible to produce policy that nobody agrees with.  And this may be the best explanation of the "intelligence failures" over Iraq.

In other words, the Bush administration didn't lie about the WMD, the sabotage, the idiocy of a plan to decapitate the Iraqi government and then transplant the head of a poodle like Chalabi -- they were (and are) organizationally incapable of understanding the truth.  It's a big difference.

Danius Maximus sent in these glaring examples of institutional "stuck thinking."  Once a policy position has been made public, it will be defended against all facts.  Fiercely maintaining an untenable position is "leadership" and being responsive to new information is "weakness."  In The March of Folly, Barbara Tuchman highlighted the role of "woodenheadedness" (the inability to process new information that conflicts with previous decisions) as the critical factor in the pursuit of policy contrary to self-interest. 

Powell is looking for more information to reinforce his position

The New York Times reported Thursday on an internal State Department document declaring it was too early to determine whether the captured Iraqi "biological weapons trailers" proved anything.

Powell insisted again on Friday that State Department analysts "do not disagree" with their counterparts at the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency who were on the scene, examined the trucks and concluded that they were mobile biological warfare facilities.

But the State Department analysts "are not entirely sure yet" and "would like to see more analysis done," Powell said, adding that a request to that effect was sent to the CIA in a memo.

"Will we continue to look for more information to reinforce our opinion? Sure, we will," he added.  [emphasis added]

The Bush administration avoided preparing an intelligence estimate on post-invasion Iraq

Robert Dryfuss reports in The Nation that a bigger scandal than the mishandling of the WMD intelligence is waiting in the wings.  It turns out that the administration -- in violation of long accepted practice -- failed to produce an intelligence estimate of what Iraq would look like during the initial occupation.  Instead, they clung to the long-discredited forecasts that Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress (INC) have been hawking since 1993, first under the brand of "End Game" and later revised with the help of Bush-pardoned Iran-Contra spook Dewey Clarridge and Gen. Wayne Downing as the "Downing Plan."

The INC plan was known at the Pentagon as "The Bay of Goats" because is was essentially the same as the Bay of Pigs with Baghdad standing in for Havana.  "We called it Chalabi's rolling coup," Bob Bauer, the C.I.A. agent in charge told Seymour Hersh.

Since the two primary intelligence disasters (no WMD and post-invasion guerilla resistance) of the Iraq war both can be laid at the door of the INC puppets, the administration is understandably resistant to anybody taking too close a look at the stew of lies, disinformation and confidence rackets which passed for the reasons to go to war and what we expected to find when we got there.

The executive chairman of UNSCOM from 1991-1997 explains the deal on the non-existent Iraqi WMD (he says it doesn't matter they weren't there...)

Rolf Ekeus has an op-ed piece in today's Washington Post. He lays out the reasons -- all known since 1998 or earlier -- the Bush administration misled themselves, the world and the nation about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.  While doing this, he also says the invasion was justified by the threat of the programs.

A few key points from the article:

• The Iraqi WMD program targeted Iran.  Everything - production, storage, stockpiles, delivery systems - was tactically and strategically aimed at a border war with Iran.  While it was possible that very limited use was possible to threaten other neighbors, it made no political or strategic sense to do so.
• The Iraqi nuclear program was justified by the parallel program in Iran.  (Though Ekeus doesn't say so, it is very likely that the same is true of the Iranian nuclear program -- or rather was true until Bush declared his intention of starting a 50-100 year regional war in the Mideast...)
• The Iraqi chemical weapons were very poor quality.  The inability to eliminate contaminants reduced the shelf-life of these weapons to a matter of weeks, not months.  This was known to the U.S. since 1991 when some chemical storage bunkers were found in Southern Iraq by the U.S. military and destroyed.  The chemicals had deteriorated to the point of uselessness.

Ekeus acknowledges the Bush administration claim that the character of the Iraqi program was such that the program -- not the stockpiles -- constituted the danger to peace.  And he says that danger justified the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the U.S. and Britain.

What Ekeus doesn't address is that all the factual evidence he puts forward (and he does so with great authority) clearly shows the claims made by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and Tenet were not factual.  As such, he demonstrates the fallacy of excluding facts in order to stick to one's point.

Policy and plans are hard to make, but once made, they are even harder to change

I think the on-going arguement about whether or not the Bush administration lied is ill-founded.  The Bush gang have been breathing their own exhaust for so long that oxygen is now poisonous to them.  The real problem is how they took the nation to war based on false information that they were neither capable nor competent to evaluate or represent.  Having blown that decision, any decisions they make now that we are occupying Iraq will follow the same delusional trajectory.

Lee Clarke's book, Mission Improbable, on the "fantasty documents" used in disaster planning has great relevance to the problems we face with the Iraq war.  According to Clarke, planning is a process by which organizations negotiate power.  They actually have little to do with their ostensible purpose.  He shows that there is very little causal relationship between planning and disaster response -- a phenomenon he calls "loose coupling."  This isn't to say that the plans don't matter or that no plans are better.  His point is that the real purpose of planning is to delineate who has the power to plan.  And the creation of plans is one way that power is not just exercised but created.

Applying Clarke's observations to the way we went to war means the neoconservative drive to start a regional war in the Mideast wasn't really about the Mideast.  It was about how the tiny group of people centered around the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for a New American Century would gain control of the federal government.

If this is the case, the nit-picking about who said what to whom, what did the president not know and when did he not know it, and all the rest of the beltway squabbling is just a continuation of the power struggle over who controls the republic.  And to the people involved in these institutional power struggles the facts don't really matter...

So Powell is still looking for information to reinforce the opinion to which he is already committed, the administration didn't really want to know what would happen once they occupied Iraq and the chairman of UNSCOM is willing to accept the invasion as a fait accompli.