Words of Waldman

What went wrong with the intelligence?

Save yourself the wait for the various inquiries to report back. Read Kenneth Pollack's article from the Atlantic Review: Spies, lies and weapons: what went wrong. (It's very long...but an extract was published in the Guardian yesterday).
Explains how, and gives some guestimates why, Saddam pulled back from WMD development in the late 90s. And how the intelligence forces didn't get this.
Then goes on to the critical relationship between politicians and intelligence agents.
Some quotes

"The Administration gave greatest credence to accounts that presented the most lurid picture of Iraqi activities. In many cases intelligence analysts were distrustful of those sources, or knew unequivocally that they were wrong"

"Of course, no policymaker should accept intelligence estimates unquestioningly. While I was at the NSC, I regularly challenged analysts as to why they believed what they did. .. However, at a certain point curiosity and diligence become a form of pressure."

"To a great extent OSP [Office of Special Plans] personnel "cherry-picked" the intelligence they passed on, selecting reports that supported the Administration's pre-existing position and ignoring all the rest...[and] often chose to believe reports that trained intelligence officers considered unreliable or downright false."

"The Bush officials who created the OSP gave its reports directly to those in the highest levels of government, often passing raw, unverified intelligence straight to the Cabinet level as gospel."

See, when it comes to intelligence, it's not what you've got: it's what you do with it that counts.

Yes, we have two inquiries...

But - and this is not something I say very often - I agree with Charles Kennedy: we're embarking on the wrong kind of inquiry.

Spending several months examining the rights and wrongs of WMD intelligence without examining the political decisions that were made - supposedly - on the back of it will be interesting, and no doubt deeply embarrasing for both government and security services at various points in time. But ultimately, it will be futile.

Instead, two very different questions need to be answered. Neither will be covered.

1. When is it right for us to invade a nation state either on humanitarian grounds, or 'on the balance of probabilities' that they pose a direct or indirect threat to us? And when not?

2. Having made the decision to go to war and carry out a regime change, did the UK and US go about it the right way?

Iraq: it ain't over, till it's over

In the Guardian today, Ewen McAskill asks what happens now in Iraq. As most of the more intelligent commentators seemed to be saying yesterday as I snoozed in front of CNN and Sky, he says: "it will not end the violence against US-led forces."
And sure enough, this morning we already have car bombs exploding at two Iraqi police stations.
I don't want to rain on anyone's parade, but Saddam's capture - as excellent news as it is - has happened too late to result in any dramatic swing in fortunes for the the co-alition troops. There now appears to be (and this is only from what I've read) a well established network of resistance: not a simple hierarchy where you just cut of the head and everything else collapses.
As McAskill concludes:

"After eight months of fighting, US and British military intelligence do not know exactly who they are fighting: the insurgents remain in the shadows. Even with Saddam removed, it is difficult to beat an enemy who cannot be readily identified."

"A land ruled by chaos"

Suzanne Goldenberg returns to Iraq after covering the war. This is what she finds.

'Iraq under the US-led occupation is a fearful, lawless and broken place, where murder rates have rocketed, 80% of workers are idle and hospital managers despair at shortages of IV sets and basic antibiotics. Police are seen as thugs and thieves, and the American and British forces as distant rulers, more concerned with protecting their troops than providing security to ordinary Iraqis. The governing council they created is simply irrelevant. A mile away from one of the richest oilfields on earth, the queues at petrol stations stretch for hours. "We completely underestimated how broken this system was," says Andrew Alderson, the financial officer of the British-led administration in Basra.
Gratitude at having been freed from Saddam has given way to resentment and mistrust in a part of Iraq that could never remotely be considered as Ba'ath country.'

Can't she see it's a land of opportunity? She'll never get a job with New Bridge Strategies.

What lovely, lovely people...

The Guardian follows up a story from the New York Times (reg. rqd etc) about a gang of 'Bush cronies' (including our very own Lord Powell) setting up a consultancy to advise businesses on how to win contracts in post-war Iraq.
In a previous era, this sort of organisation would at best have had a discreet brochure. Now, however New Bridge Strategies has its own website, so we can all read about its wonderful work. I am not making this up.

New Bridge Strategies LLC is a unique company that was created specifically with the aim of assisting clients to evaluate and take advantage of business opportunities in the Middle East following the conclusion of the U.S.-led war in Iraq. Its activities will seek to expedite the creation of free and fair markets and new economic growth in Iraq, consistent with the policies of the Bush Administration. The opportunities evolving in Iraq today are of such an unprecedented nature and scope that no other existing firm has the necessary skills and experience to be effective both in the United States and on the ground in Iraq.

I dread to think exactly what 'the necessary skills and experience' are.
The front of the site has a map on it, which we read will soon be interactive (I suppose it's 'under construction'):

In the very near future our interactive map of Iraq will show areas of opportunity in the post-war rebuilding effort for specific industries. New Bridge Strategies can then assist companies in those specific industries with their efforts.

How efficient. I find the whole idea quite repellant, but completely unsurprising. However, I'd love to have been a fly on the wall during the meeting when they were coming up with the name.
Anyway, they better hurry up. Looks like rather a lot of business has already been handed out.

Keeping track of the casualties

I'm impressed by the combination of transparency, efficiency and geekery that you find on the US Central Military Command's website (leaflet drop anyone?). In particular their database of casualty reports. It is a wonderfully grim and efficient sift-and-sort tool. You want to find out how many casualties suffered by US soldiers by RPG attacks in the last 99 days. You got it.
The Ministry of Defence list of casualties is an altogether more human(e) affair (when you actually find it...am I the only one who didn't know it was called Operation Telic...what about trademarks? ). The soldiers are named. Photos are supplied (obviously important for the press). There's lots of glowing tributes. Current total, by the way, has just topped 50.
CNN meanwhile is keeping an alphabetic roll call of both US and UK casualties. Which is moving, but ultimately uninformative.
Why? This may seem macabre. Ok, by definition, it is macabre. But as the deaths pile up and casualties - while still tragic for the families and friends of those who die - become an ever less surprising part of the news, the trends are becoming as important as the people themselves. The proportion of deaths by friendly vs enemy fire. The rate of casualties by month and by type. We need to see things improving, if we are to have any faith at all in the assertion that things are getting better there.

Treating soldiers like unwanted stepchildren

This is a bit late, but..whatever: The Nation had a great one of those 'on the ground with our pissed-off troops pieces' in it's Oct 6 issue. titled: 'Stretched thin, lied to and mistreated' by Christian Parenti.
For some reason, they've decided not to put the whole article up online...so I'll paraphrase. Just so you can get an idea of what it's like for the soldiers living/ working there:

'The military treats these soldiers like unwanted stepchildren. The unit's rifles are retoolded hand-me-downs from Vietnam. They have inadequate radio gear, so they buy their own unencrypted Motorola walkie-talkies. They same goes for flashlights, knives and some components for night-vision sights. The low performance Iraqi air conditioners and fans, as well as the one satellite phone and payment cards shared by the whole company for clalling home, were purchased out of pocket from civilian suppliers.'

They also seem to be woefully ill-equipped in terms of the sort of fighting they are up against:

'Perhaps the most shocking bit of military incompetence is the unit's lack of formal training in "close quarter combat"....many US infantrymen are trained only in large-scale open-country maneuvers - how to defend Germany from a wave of Russian tanks...."The houses here are small too," says [Sgt] Brunelle. "Once you're inside you can barely get your rifle up. You got women screaming, people, furniture, everywhere. It's insane.'

Surprise: The hunt for weapons of mass destruction yields - nothing

As reported in today's Guardian

An intensive six-month search of Iraq for weapons of mass destruction has failed to discover a single trace of an illegal arsenal, according to accounts of a report circulating in Washington and London..... "It demonstrates that the main judgments of the national intelligence estimate (NIE) in October 2002, that Saddam had hundreds of tonnes of chemical and biological agents ready, are false."

Who would have thought it?
2 Oct Update Interim report by David Kay reveals

"We have not yet found stocks of weapons, but we are not yet at the point where we can say definitively either that such weapon stocks do not exist or that they existed before the war and our only task is to find where they have gone. "

'I just flicked the rant switch on, wrote for half an hour and was surprised that the world took notice'

Salam Pax explains how he got started. Well, he's got a book to promote.
Meanwhile, in case you haven't seen it, try Riverbend's blog: Baghdad Burning

No running water all day today. Horrible. Usually there are at least a few hours of running water, today there’s none. E. went out and asked if there was perhaps a pipe broken? The neighbors have no idea. Everyone is annoyed beyond reason...Luckily, yesterday I filled all the water bottles. We have dozens of water bottles, both glass and plastic. Every time there’s even a semblance of running water, we put something under the faucet to catch the precious drops. We fill bottles, pots, thermoses, buckets- anything that will hold water. Some days are better than others....The problem is this: when the electricity is off, the municipal water pumps don’t work- the water pressure is so low, the water won’t go up the faucet. When there *is* electricity, everyone starts up their own, personal, water pumps to fill the water tanks on the roof and the water pressure drops again.

Iraq: it just goes on

Michael Meacher goes for the conspiracy theory that the US let 9/11 happen, because they wanted to go to war for new oil. A little too student in a pub conspiracy theorist for my liking, although, when you hear of Republican fund raising drives that build on 9/11, you do wonder.
Jonathan Freedland, meanwhile, sums up the irony of the situation:

"At his eve-of-war press conference back in March, the president cast the coming attack as the next step in a story that had begun on September 11 2001. Iraq was providing "training and safe haven to terrorists, terrorists who would willingly use weapons of mass destruction against America and other peace-loving countries". The irony is that, at the time, this was not true. But it is now."

and concludes:

An enterprise that was misconceived from the beginning was hardly going to reach a smooth end. Now that it has started, it has to be run differently - with more money, more personnel, more allies and a timetable for free elections. To get all that may require one more thing, which only the American people can provide, 14 months from now: new leadership.