Redstate

And when did they know it?

By streiff Posted in War — Comments (2) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Former CIA official and energetic apologist for that agency's abyssmal performance in assessing Iraq's possession of chemical weapons, Paul Pillar, is off on a new jihad to put lipstick on the pig that is the CIA.

Who cares if we were wrong, says Pillar, what we said didn't matter anyway:

The tremendous notoriety the estimate on weapons programs achieved has been all out of proportion to any role it played, or should have played, in the decision to launch the war. The administration never requested it (Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee did), its public line about Iraqi weapons programs was well-established before it was written, and as the White House later admitted, the president (and the then national security adviser) did not even read it—nor did most members of Congress. Opposition to the war among many at home and abroad who shared the misperceptions about Iraqi weapons programs demonstrated that those perceptions did not, contrary to the administration’s enormous selling effort, imply that a war was necessary.

Read on.

The real issue says Pillar is that the CIA predicted the outcome and therefore it was silly to proceed with the war altogether:

The story of these pre-war assessments has other implications that are at least important, however, including ones for current debate over Iraq policy. The assessments support the proposition that the expedition in Iraq always was a fool’s errand rather than a good idea spoiled by poor execution, implying that the continued search for a winning strategy is likely to be fruitless. Some support for the poor execution hypothesis can be found in the assessments, such as the observation that Iraq’s regular army could make an important contribution in providing security (thus implicitly questioning in advance the wisdom of ever disbanding the army). But the analysts had no reason to assume poor execution, and their prognosis was dark nonetheless.

John Hinderacker at PowerLine does a masterful job of dissecting Pillar's exercise in deflection and self-congratulation so there is no need to plow that ground again.

The salient points are these:

1. According to Pillar mismanagement of the war is not an issue, the chaos was inevitable (paralleling my story here).

2. The reports are not as clear cut as Pillar alleges. In fact they are rife with typical CIA hemming and hawing.

3. The decision of whether or not to enter the war was and remains a political decision. A bureaucracy is out of its lane by a huge margin in making those political judgments.

But even taking Pillar's apologia in its best light it still doesn't answer the obvious rejoinders: how useful is an agency that is grossly wrong 1/3 of the time and partly correct the other 2/3? how are decisionmakers going to know which reports are blatantly wrong and which are only partly in error?