Toughness Over Intelligence
Posted by
Kevin
The neo-cons have always been wrong. They were wrong about the state of the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s, they were wrong about the nature and responses to the threat to terrorism, and they are wrong about the effectiveness of torture. In each case, they were wrong in a peculiar fashion: they have always thought that the United States was weak and that is it would just be tougher, the enemy of the day would collapse.
Torture is the most obvious example: torture is a tool of oppression and coercion, not of intelligence. Torture is sued to get people to do and say what you want, not to tell you the truth. It is being “tough” on terrorists, a method to scare the bad guys into stopping. We will get to the stupidity of that in a moment, but torture is just the latest of a long line of items fetishize-ing “getting tough” in the history of the group of radicals we now call neo-cons. This nonsense started almost the moment they gained some measure of power, with “Team B”.
Team B was a group of outside experts sent into to evaluate American intelligence on the Soviet Union. Needless to say, the neo-cons they used got pretty much everything wrong:
The outside experts on Team B were led by Harvard Professor Richard Pipes and included such well-known hawks as Paul Nitze, William Van Cleave, and Paul Wolfowitz. Not surprisingly, Team B concluded that the intelligence specialists had badly underestimated the threat because they relied too heavily on hard data, instead of extrapolating the Soviets’ intentions from ideology.[1] According to some Team B members, “the principal threat to our nation, to world peace, and to the cause of human freedom was the Soviet drive for dominance based upon an unparalleled military buildup.”[2]
Although the Team B report contained little factual data, it was enthusiastically received by conservative groups such as the Committee on the Present Danger, whose members included Ronald Reagan, and the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. But the report turned out to be grossly inaccurate. For example, it said that the Soviets would have 500 intercontinental Backfire bombers capable of striking the United States by 1984. In reality, only 235 were deployed. Team B also claimed that the Soviets were working on an anti-acoustic submarine, though they failed to find any evidence of one. The hawks explained away this lack of evidence by stating that “the submarine may have already been deployed because it appeared to have evaded detection.”[3]
Team B was right about one thing. The CIA estimate was indeed flawed. In 1989, the agency published an internal review of the threat assessments from 1974 to 1986. The report concluded that the Soviet threat had been “substantially overestimated” every year. In 1978, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found that the selection of Team B members yielded a flawed composition of political views and biases.[4] Consequently, the Team B analysis was deemed a gross exaggeration and completely inaccurate.
Team B’s assessment was incorrect to the point of garbage. But the errors always made the Soviet Union seem much more powerful and dangerous than it actually was. And when many of its members found their way into the Reagan Administration, the US wasted trillions of dollars trying to match a non-existent Soviet weapons juggernaut.
This wasn’t to be their last colossal failure. In the 1990s, the neo-cons formed something called the Project for a New American Century. One of its contentions was that Iraq was a serious threat to the United States and must be dealt with immediately. Saddam was such a threat that he had to be removed immediately:
We are writing you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding, and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War. In your upcoming State of the Union Address, you have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting this threat. We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power. We stand ready to offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor.
… The policy of “containment” of Saddam Hussein has been steadily eroding over the past several months. As recent events have demonstrated, we can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition to continue to uphold the sanctions or to punish Saddam when he blocks or evades UN inspections. Our ability to ensure that Saddam Hussein is not producing weapons of mass destruction, therefore, has substantially diminished. Even if full inspections were eventually to resume, which now seems highly unlikely, experience has shown that it is difficult if not impossible to monitor Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons production. The lengthy period during which the inspectors will have been unable to enter many Iraqi facilities has made it even less likely that they will be able to uncover all of Saddam’s secrets. As a result, in the not-too-distant future we will be unable to determine with any reasonable level of confidence whether Iraq does or does not possess such weapons
That last paragraph was completely wrong, of course. Not only did Saddam have no WMDs, the inspectors on the ground before the invasion said as much:
Following press reports that the Bush administration has begun supplying inspectors with intelligence, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohamed ElBaradei tells reporters that the inspection teams need “more actionable information” and that the US is still refusing to provide “specific intelligence about where to go and where to inspect.” He adds that “the inspections process will intensify to allow the inspections to speedup” if the Bush administration cooperates with inspectors. He also suggests that he does not think Iraq has a nuclear weapons program. He says: “I think it’s difficult for Iraq to hide a complete nuclear-weapons program. They might be hiding some computer studies or R. and D. on one single centrifuge. These are not enough to make weapons.” [Time, 1/12/2003; Montreal Gazette, 1/11/2003; Sun-Herald (Sydney), 1/12/2003; Washington Post, 1/11/2003] Richard A. Boucher, a spokesperson for the State Department, contests ElBaradei’s contention that inspectors have been given little to go on, saying, “I can certainly say that they’re getting the best we’ve got, and that we are sharing information with the inspectors that they can use, and based on their ability to use it.” [Washington Post, 1/11/2003]
… UN Secretary General Kofi Annan orders all UN weapons inspectors, peacekeepers, and humanitarian aid workers to withdraw from Iraq. [Washington File, 3/17/2003] UN inspectors have been in Iraq since November 18 (see November 18, 2002). During their four months of work in Iraq, they inspected hundreds of sites (some of them more than once) and found no evidence of ongoing WMD programs. Their work was reportedly obstructed, not by the Iraqis, but by the US which refused to provide inspectors with the intelligence they needed to identify sites for inspection (see February 12, 2003) (see December 5, 2002) (see December 6, 2002) (see December 20, 2002) (see January 11, 2003). Of the 105 sites identified by US intelligence as likely housing illicit weapons, 21 were deliberately withheld from inspectors. [Bamford, 2004, pp. 344]
Once they got their way, they seemed determined to have a “tough” war. There is little argument that the Abu Gharib tortures were systematic and centered in policy. And those policies appear to have originated form the idiotic notion that Arabs are unusually susceptible to humiliation and only understand force. If that notion seems odd — as it does to anyone who actually pays attention to human beings — its oddness can be explained by the fact that the neo-cons appear to have gotten their strange notions from a thirty year old, deeply racist, deeply flawed book:
AMONG THE STARTLING revelations in Seymour Hersh’s recent articles about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal was news of a peculiar scholarly revival. In the May 24 issue of The New Yorker, Hersh wrote that it was the late Raphael Patai, a Hungarian-born cultural anthropologist who taught at Columbia and Princeton, whose work provided the intellectual backdrop for the torture and sexual abuse that took place at Abu Ghraib. Patai’s 1973 book “The Arab Mind,” an unnamed academic told Hersh, had become “the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.” In his discussion with conservative prowar intellectuals, the same academic told Hersh, two themes predominated: “One, that Arabs only understand force, and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.”
… Patai’s work is emblematic of a bygone era of scholarship focused on the notion of a “national character,” or personality archetype. (A longtime resident of Jerusalem, he also penned a book titled “The Jewish Mind.”) For such scholars, a set of sweeping generalizations about the personality of an entire people could be extrapolated from dubious anecdotal and literary references. In Patai’s case, his methodology was itself based on a fatally flawed set of assumptions — most importantly, that there is one entirely homogenous Arab culture, derived from nomadic Bedouin culture. This ignores both the diversity and history of a people and civilization that extends across dozens of countries, from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, and the deeply rooted Arab culture of cities and agricultural communities.
They wanted to get tough and they apparently latched onto a book that told them they had to get tough to get through to Arabs. It would be funny if it hadn’t resulted in the largest strategic disaster in modern, perhaps all of, American history:
A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.
The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.
The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.
An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.
These people have always been wrong. And they have always erred on the side of being “tough”. They appear to think that they can swagger their way through history, that the world will tremble at the sound of their mighty tread. They have substituted the appearance of toughness for intelligence and actual strength. They have created a movie in their minds and think themselves to be playing the part of the steely-eyed missile man, bullying through the problems of the world. That may work for Rambo, but in the real world it is just another, peculiar form of idiocy. Unfortunately for this country, it appears to be an idiocy that no amount of fact or failure can
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