CIA

Despite well over a decade of military observers, investigations, “fact finding” missions, and intensive intelligence gathering, the American military and intelligence communities found themselves repeatedly explaining to four consecutive US presidents that a guerilla war against the Viet Minh (Viet Cong) in Indochina was not something the US could win, with both the military and CIA vehemently opposing the US entry into the Indochina war. Irregardless, with the Tonkin Gulf incident as LBJ’s excuse, we soon got the US Marines landing on the beaches near Da Nang, massive troop build-ups, and a full scale shooting war in South Vietnam. Apparently, because the White House better understands the conduct of field operations than do military commanders on the scene, the military soon found themselves “micro-managed” by Washington to the extent that then President Johnson often bragged the Air Force couldn’t bomb an outhouse without his express permission. At the same time, the CIA was directed to conduct an “in the black” covert war in the jungles of Laos, a mission that the agency was totally unprepared to handle. The Pentagon, and Langley, put their best efforts into following orders, but even so the effort was somewhat akin to bailing out New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina with a leaky teacup.

Towards the end of the war, the previously hawkish US Congress began looking for scapegoats to take the rap for the perceived US failure. As it was (and apparently still is) totally inconceivable that our political leadership could possibly make any errors in judgment, political expediency told them that the fault must obviously lie within the US Armed Forces and our intelligence agencies. With that political decision, congress began a multi-year effort to emasculate the US military and CIA, an effort that the far left continues to this day. The military survived those efforts, just barely, and thanks to President Ronald Reagan, managed to revive themselves sufficiently for George Bush the elder to successfully conduct the Desert Storm war. The CIA, starved of funds and under severe oversight by congressional amateurs who haven’t the vaguest idea of what intelligence gathering is all about, wasn’t quite as fortunate. The media had predicted that after the near wrecking of the CIA, it would take decades to rebuild our foreign intelligence capabilities. That time has passed, and the job still hasn't been done.

Following the congressional hatchet job at Langley, President Jimmy Carter's administration, in its incessant playing to the radical left, cut even deeper. The Carter efforts had gotten rid of nearly all the US “humint” (Human Intelligence) assets worldwide that would have been able to properly keep track of the goings on in the clandestine world, resulting in the only intelligence resource available to the United States being satellite photos, along with whatever was forwarded by our friends and allies throughout the world. With 9-11 and the War on Terror, we trusted the intelligence data passed on to us by the British, French, Germans, and several other nations, a necessity required by the need to fill the artificial void created at CIA. As it’s also politically unthinkable that the intelligence agencies of these allied countries could have misled us, George W. Bush believed the information we received concerning Iraq was credible, so apparently did Colin Powell and the US Congress. After the invasion, and after no Iraqi WMD’s had been found, we heard the wails from European capitols that “we didn’t say the information we passed along was reliable or credible”. Apparently they didn’t say it was unreliable either, until well after the war had started. And if they thought it was unreliable, why did they join us in attacking Saddam’s Iraq? And yet once again Congress, and the media, laid the blame squarely on the CIA.

I rather think that this questionable intelligence data was considered reliable at the time by all parties involved. After all, we know that Saddam did have chemical weapons. He used them against Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. We know that he used those weapons against his own restive population on several occasions. We know that he had those weapons at the time of Desert Storm, because we found many of them lying around Iraqi ammunition dumps after the cease fire. What we didn’t know, and apparently still don’t, is just how extensive Saddam’s WMD programs actually were.

FBI special agent George Piro, a Lebanese-American who speaks Arabic, questioned Saddam after he was captured near Tikrit in December 2003. Prio told CBS's "60 Minutes" program that Saddam expected only a limited aerial attack by the United States and thought he could remain in control. "He told me he initially miscalculated ... President Bush's intentions," said Piro. "He thought the United States would retaliate with the same type of attack as we did in 1998 ... a four-day aerial attack." "He survived that one and he was willing to accept that type of attack," Piro added. The Associated Press spoke to an aide of Saddam's in August 2003, who also said that Saddam did not expect a U.S. invasion and deliberately kept everyone guessing about his weapons program, although he already had gotten rid of it. Saddam publicly denied having these weapons before the U.S. invasion, but prevented UN inspectors working in-country to prove or disprove his claims. Piro said that Saddam wanted to keep up the illusion, partly because he thought it would deter a possible Iranian invasion. Instead, his “faking” brought about a US led invasion and the fall of B’aathist Iraq. Piro added that Saddam had the intent of restarting the Iraqi weapons program, and did have the scientists and engineers for future chemical, biological and nuclear weapons development. Despite the UN’s inability to find anything, given the geography of Iraq it would not be difficult to believe that Saddam did have a quite large stockpile of WMD’s hidden in the desert. I’m reminded of the difficulties we’ve had in finding Saddam’s hidden ammunition dumps, and a chemical artillery shell isn’t very large. Humm… What other nasty little surprises might be stashed away in Iraq’s deserts?

With the gift of 20/20 hindsight, the American political left in this election year continually decries the invasion of Iraq and the ongoing war, accusing President Bush and the Republican party of being militaristic, along with a wide assortment of other failings. Yet what else was the president to do? He is after all, sworn to defend the United States to the best of his ability. Arab terrorists had already used civil airliners as missiles, causing extensive death and destruction in this country. He was well aware that Saddam was the sworn enemy of the United States, and had previously demonstrated both possession of, and a willingness to utilize, WMD’s. Saddam’s continued deliberate faking of having these weapons fooled nearly every intelligence agency in the world apparently. With that, how hard would it have been to believe that Saddam might happily hand a few chemical weapons over to al-Qaeda, for use in terrorist attacks against the United States?

If it looks like a duck, waddles like a duck, and quacks like a duck, at first sight most of us would probably think it’s a duck.