The CIA insurgency

Opinion Journal:

Congratulations to Porter Goss for being confirmed last week as the new Director of Central Intelligence. We hope he appreciates that he now has two insurgencies to defeat: the one that the CIA is struggling to help put down in Iraq, and the other inside Langley against the Bush Administration.

We wish we were exaggerating. It's become obvious over the past couple of years that large swaths of the CIA oppose U.S. anti-terror policy, especially toward Iraq. But rather than keep this dispute in-house, the dissenters have taken their objections to the public, albeit usually through calculated and anonymous leaks that are always spun to make the agency look good and the Bush Administration look bad.

Their latest improvised explosive political device blew up yesterday on the front page of the New York Times, in a story proclaiming that the agency had warned back in January 2003 of a possible insurgency in Iraq. This highly selective leak (more on that below) was conveniently timed for two days before the first Presidential debate.

...

Yesterday's CIA leak, of the January 2003 memo, also turns out to be what the spooks call "disinformation." We're told that its ballyhooed warning of an insurgency is not among the document's key findings and occurs only in the very last sentence of its 38 pages. We're also told there is not a single mention of Zarqawi, the dominant terrorist now in Iraq, or of "the Party of Return," the name the Baath Party remnants began circulating soon after the fall of Saddam.

The document's after-thought sentence reads: "In addition, rogue ex-regime elements could forge an alliance with existing terrorist organizations or act independently to wage guerrilla warfare against the new government or coalition forces." We highlight that phrase about "existing terrorist" groups because critics of the war like to claim that there were no terrorists in Iraq before the war; now we know that in January 2003 even the CIA said there were.

Notably, too, the leakers of this document somehow overlooked the many predictions it made that did not come true. Those include: sectarian violence, seizure of the oil fields in the north by Kurds and in the South by Shiites, a humanitarian and refugee crisis, and the possible use by Saddam of "chemical or biological weapons against his own people and coalition forces." Worst of all, the document anticipated that the Iraqi police and regular army could be relied upon to provide order in Iraq after the invasion. Deputy Director John McLaughlin personally assured Mr. Bush on this one--which we now know to be a mistake as large as predicting that finding Saddam's WMD would be a "slam dunk."


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Bin Laden's concern about Zarqawi's remains