It’s Not The Spies’ Fault

AWOT editors have written widely on the blurring of lines between different branches of government, and the consequences this has for being able to locate and resolve problems. AWOT has also noticed the tendency for the contemporary Bush administration to respond to political crises with institutional fixes. The most recent example of this came with the recent sacking of Porter Goss, the CIA director, after only an eighteen month tenure. His sacking has raised questions about the role of intelligence in national security decision-making, and the relationship between intelligence and politics. In particular, it has led to doubts that responses to the perceived intelligence failures of the CIA post 9/11 and post-Iraq have made any headway in resolving the problem. An awareness is developing that the problem may not be institutional, but political.

Goss was appointed in September 2004, replacing George J. Tenet. His job had been made difficult from the outset by the reforms of the intelligence community brought in by Congress in its Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act. This created a post of intelligence czar, the ‘director of national intelligence’ (DNI), which took over a number of functions from the CIA director, including the daily briefing of the President. In recent months, John Negroponte, the new DNI, clashed with Goss over a number of issues.

Subsequent critical commentary has focused on the counter-productive impact of the DNI job, and in particular the proliferation of bureaucracy within the intelligence community. In a recent Financial Times article, appeals court judge Richard Posner, author of Uncertain Shield: The US Intelligence System in the Throes of Reform, was quoted as saying that “the reorganization was a mistake, was misconceived, [was] not responsive to the problems in the intelligence community.”

However, the FT article makes the interesting observation that today, some voices are being heard that are saying that the problems are not to be found within the intelligence community at all. They are political problems. This has been the claim of employees within the CIA, who have defended the agency’s work, claiming that Iraq was not a failure of intelligence, but was a product of political exigencies overriding the advice provided by state servants. In other words, the White House would only listen to what it wanted to hear, rather than take into account opposing arguments.

The picture that emerges is one that is familiar to AWOT readers: an administration where decision-making has been concentrated within a small number of individuals, who pursue goals without the considered deliberation and reflection that is spread across the institutions of government. Yet this inversion of the process by which democracies are supposed to operate is accompanied by another trend worth highlighting: the conduct of war in the absence of any real threat or enemy.

From this perspective, there’s no point in blaming the spies. Since the humanitarian interventions of the 1990s, threat assessments and political goals have been uncoupled. Or put another way, national security has become increasingly politicized, and no longer exists as a field that is distinct and abstracted from the domestic political fray. That intelligence became a political football in the run up to the Iraq war should, on this understanding, come as no surprise.