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Archive for the ‘Iraq’ Category

Iraq Realities vs. Neocon Dreams

Posted in foreign policy, Iraq on November 15, 2003|

[Originally published in the Valley News.]

Judging from the recent pronouncements of the Bush administration, our major goals in Iraq are to hold free elections, set up a government and establish a representative democracy. The ultimate aim is to create such an exemplary model of democracy that it will threaten and ultimately undo the repressive, undemocratic regimes in the Middle East. However worthy those goals may be, it’s important to judge our prospects for accomplishing them.

The opening reality in the Middle East is Islam. Islam, as embodied in the Koran and its amplifying writings, the Hadith and the Shariya, provides not only a belief structure, but a blueprint for all facets of life. Islam is more than a formal belief system; it is an all-encompassing guide for thought and action that has no parallel in the Western world. The system itself is theocentric, moralistic, simple, lucid and positive and is as much concerned with man’s behavior on Earth as it is with his fate in the afterlife. As in any of the great religions, practices and even beliefs vary from sect to sect and individual-to-individual, nevertheless, the blueprint for all those sects in Islam is the Koran.

The three major Islamic writings provide the Muslim ethical code, which covers virtually every form of human behavior from the appropriate conduct of business affairs to nursing and weaning babies. Islam leaves little to the discretion of the believer, for whom religion and life, faith and politics are inseparable. Political beliefs stem from the theocratic imperative of Islam as embodied in the Koran and the Shariya (Islamic law), which is considered to be the embodiment of the will of God. There is no section in the Koran or the Shariya that supports or even covers representative democracy. It is rather an alien philosophy to the any Muslims, particularly the Iraqis. who have never had any experience with it and most of whom, outside their intelligentsia, are only vaguely aware of its workings.

Iraq has three main ethnic and religious groups; the Kurds (15 percent of the population) in the north, the Sunnis (20 percent) in the middle and the Shias (60 percent) in the south. Of these three groups, the Shias are religiously allied with one important Shia-governed country, the fundamentalist regime in Iran. There have always been established religious ties between the Iraqi and Iranian Shia clerics. Little information is available about the inclination of Iraqi Shias to replicate the theocracy of their coreligionists in Iran, but the tendency is there and will grow as our occupation continues and security disintegrates. Note that they would have an absolute majority in any truly democratic election in Iraq.

Given the democratic pressures building in their own country, Iranian clerics would regard it as unfortunate and even threatening to have a successful, democratic Iraq on their western border. The same can be said of virtually any of the repressive, undemocratic Muslim regimes in the region. It would be unsettling, for example, for the Saudi Royal House to have a functioning representative democracy to the north.

In short, there is little appetite in that region for democratic change and a lot of power and resources to throw against it. For these undemocratic regimes, their own national interests do not lie in the spread of democracy in the area and it is simply not in their own narrow interests to support our efforts.

The dilemma here is that the only viable alternative to our current unilateral occupation is the internationalization of the effort through the United Nations. If we leave Iraq to a U.N.- sponsored administration, we will create a situation in which there will be almost immediate elections that will have roughly zero hope of establishing any sort of representative government.

On the other hand, if we continue our unilateral occupation, what will really matter is whether we can improve security enough to hold elections that will promote the political transformation of Iraq. Because of the continuing deterioration of the security situation in Iraq, it is more likely that we will be faced with the choice of either running democratic elections that will have no hope of installing democracy or of putting those elections off in the hope that the situation will become more favorable to achieving our goal. The latter choice will provide yet another pressure on an already deteriorating situation, one that likely will lead to more discontent, more violence and less hope for a favorable political transformation. That is likely to leave us with no viable alternatives for democracy and no exit strategy.

The most critical factor is the good will of the Iraqi people. Once they turn against us psychologically and emotionally, it will be too late. If we have not done so already, we will soon pass that critical point of no return. In short, the current American occupation of Iraq (and it is the fact that it is American that the Iraqis so resent) represents a gigantic gamble by the neoconservatives who designed this policy.

The neoconservatives’ dream of creating a model democracy in Iraq is just that – a dream. Political and religious realities in Iraq are disrupting that plan. It seems unlikely that any democratically elected government in Iraq will be secular or even pro-American. Would the Bush administration accept free elections in Iraq if the result were a theocratic, non-secular state?

There is still time. It is the American occupation of their country that the Iraqis resent. The United Nations remains ready to take on this task, if terms can be arranged to its liking. All of the realities in the area argue against the success of our current policy. The best we can hope for in these circumstances is a Muslim Iraq favorably disposed to the West.  The alternative may be another Iran or Taliban-dominated Afghanistan.

Our continued insistence on unilateral, American control of Iraq is very likely to end in disaster.  This will complicate our real problem – the war on terrorism, which seems to have gotten lost in the ideological adventurism of the neoconservatives in the Bush administration.

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA Station Chief who served in Beirut and Tehran and was Chief of the CIA’s Counter-terrorism staff. He lives in Williston.

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We Can’t Abandon Iraq, but we can Drop Unilateralism

Posted in foreign policy, Iraq on October 4, 2003|

[Originally published in the Valley News.]

The fact that al-Qaida has not hit us here at home in the past two years does not mean that we are any more secure now than we were the day before 9/11. Al-Qaida is an experienced, competent, organized, compartmentalized terrorist organization that considers us, and no one but us, its prime enemy.

That makes what we have done in Iraq even more problematical. After all the administration’s claims about weapons of mass destruction and terrorism, not one of its allegations has been substantiated. What we have done in Iraq is revolutionary and far reaching. We have undertaken a unilateral, unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation for the first time since the founding of the United Nations and continue to claim the right to conduct pre-emptive attacks. That tells other countries that it is OK for them to do likewise. In the process, we have renounced the primacy of the United Nations, an organization that we set up to try to maintain world peace. We have done this at the same time that we have demonstrated in Iraq that we cannot maintain peace by ourselves. We also have scorned our traditional allies in Europe and Asia who got us through the last half of the 20th century, including the first gulf war, telling them that we are not interested in what they have to say about international affairs.

What have we accomplished? We have lost our real allies, perhaps for a very long time. We are stuck in Iraq without a clue about what to do next. We are getting our troops killed in a chaotic environment to which we clearly are unable to bring even the most rudimentary order. Worst of all, we have lost our focus on the real terrorist target. We have not destroyed al-Qaida, and it is probable that our attack on and occupation of Iraq will bring al-Qaida more recruits than it could possibly have gotten on its own.

It is really hard to see any good having come from our actions except for having done in Saddam Hussein.

Developments since we “won” in Iraq have been so unnerving that the Bush administration is clearly rethinking its unilateralist policies. It is admitting that the United States cannot pull off its goals, whatever they may be, without help from those countries we have already told to get lost. Perhaps as a gesture to Secretary of State Colin Powell and his belief in multilateralism, George Bush seems to be saying we will try it again. However, the real issue here is what he is prepared to give up and what our scorned former friends and allies will demand. What’s in it for France, Germany and Russia to sign on as second-rate partners in this endeavor? Why should they see it in their national interest, even though they probably understand the ultimate importance of a stable Iraq?

If Bush’s attempts to enlist other countries’ help in Iraq on his terms results in impasse, he will be able to say he tried multilateralism and that it failed. No doubt that will please administration hardliners who initially championed unilateralism, but it will leave us in a terrible bind because we really cannot afford to bail out of Iraq, however wrongheaded the decision was that took us there in the first place. The fact that we have gotten ourselves into this mess is no argument for withdrawing from Iraq. Quite the contrary, the consequences of withdrawal would be grave.

Iraq truly must be stabilized. With three competing national groups, Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis and their dozens of subsets, this will not be easy. Iran supports the Shiites, the Saudis support the Sunnis, and Turkey will not allow the Iraqi Kurds to have autonomy for fears about their own Kurds. Historically this geographic area has been ruled successfully only by force. If we are unable to stabilize Iraq, chaos will reign and we will find that we have replicated pre-9/11 Afghanistan in Iraq as a training ground and safe haven for terrorists.

It will take massive resources to stabilize Iraq. Many doubt that we can do it alone. Even if we try, most of the rest of the world, including the Iraqis and the other Middle Eastern countries, do not want us to do this unilaterally.

The only practical way out of this mess is to internationalize the problem, put the United Nations in charge and reconstitute our old alliances. In other words, the Bush administration is unlikely to succeed in this part of the world without abandoning its failed notions of unilateralism and getting back into the world’s good graces. At this point, America needs to decide what face it wants to present to the world.

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA station chief who served in Beirut and Tehran and was chief of the CIA’s counter-terrorism staff. He lives in Williston.

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Intelligence Customized to Fit a Policy

Posted in foreign policy, intelligence, Iraq on June 14, 2003|

[Originally published in the Valley News.]

During the period between the Second World War and 9/11, the United States pursued a policy of containment toward unfriendly governments. That worked remarkably well in the bipolar world of the Cold War. Now, in the absence of the practical constraints imposed by the Cold War, the Bush administration has moved completely away from containment to a unilateral, pre-emptive policy toward governments it sees as unfriendly. That changes everything in the provision and use of intelligence.

There are two kinds of intelligence. There is raw, unevaluated intelligence that comes from spies, technical intercepts or overhead collection systems. Raw intelligence is provided to analysts with only a source description and evaluation. Second, there is finished intelligence, or raw intelligence that has been analyzed, compared to all other like information available from all sources and evaluated for its accuracy. This analysis is conducted in the intelligence community by analysts, many of whom have spent entire careers focused on one country and who are truly experts in their fields. It is their finished intelligence that is provided to policy makers.

The purpose of providing intelligence to policy makers is to give them a basis for the formulation of foreign policy. If the intelligence is accurate, it can give indications of policies that might be valid for any given situation. It is important to note here that intelligence is not always acted upon or even accepted by administrations. On many occasions, administrations have formulated their policies not on the basis of objective facts and professional analyses, but on the basis of their own internal political needs. A perfect example of this has been the policy of virtually every post-war American administration toward the Israeli-Palestinian situation, which has ignored analysts’ warnings that the Arab and Muslim perception of U.S. policy as one-sided could create problems.

In the past, when an administration chose not to act on intelligence analysis, more often that not it simply ignored what had been provided. There are relatively few instances where an administration has gone to its own analysis to support a policy or policy change. The Tonkin Gulf incident during the Vietnam War has some elements of that.

Now, however, in the face of growing criticism, the Bush administration finds itself in the position of having to defend itself against the allegation that it has provided itself with its own analysis of raw intelligence in support of the policy it presumably had already decided to undertake, but needed to justify. At issue are the claims that the Bush administration used to justify the war. The Iraqi government’s possession of weapons of mass destruction and its connections with the al-Qaida terrorist network were the rationales used, and at this moment it appears that both were and still are lacking substance.

If this is true, it would be a clear-cut example of the politicization of foreign policy. That happens when a policy maker rejects analysis from the apolitical, professional intelligence community and sets up his own unit to “re-look” the raw intelligence and find “other meanings” for it. One has to look only to the Defense Department’s recently created Office of Special Plans to see the likely embodiment of that approach. Various administration officials, including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz have acknowledged that OSP has done precisely that, “re-looked” the raw intelligence prior to the invasion.

The administration clearly did not like the analyses it was getting from the intelligence community. Those analyses did not support their allegations of substantive Iraqi-al-Qaida ties and was lukewarm on the weapons of mass destruction threat. “Regime change” was not an acceptable rationale during the run-up to the war. OSP “re-looked” the old raw data and said the professional analysts were wrong. In doing so, it appears to have relied in a large measure on information provided by emigres and defectors.

The CIA learned about such sources the hard way during the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe after the Second World War. Such sources, more often than not, have axes to grind and self-serving agendas. They are not above fabricating when it suits their interests. It takes a great deal of patience to sort them out, unless you are a policy maker looking for “information” to support or justify a policy you have already decided to undertake. Then you might be inclined to accept the information at face value. We have always called that French reasoning, or the act of making existing facts fit a predetermined conclusion.

The Pentagon, including OSP, bought Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress, hook, line and sinker, even though the CIA and the State Department had long gravely mistrusted him. He is the “Pentagon’s boy” (read OSP) and is presumably one of those who told us that we would be welcomed by the population, that the Iraqis would throw down their arms without a fight and dozens of other truth-mitigating tidbits that in the aggregate would persuade us to go ahead with our invasion. That’s what the Iraqi National Congress wanted, but could never accomplish on its own – the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the subsequent opportunity for the INC to gain power in Iraq.

With luck we may be able to sort out the issues in Iraq as well as those in the world brought on by our unilateralism and bring some sort of stability there. If we do, it will not be because we had good intelligence, analysis or policy. If nothing else, the events surrounding the run-up to Iraq as well as the war and the aftermath may give good, pragmatic reason to rely on facts and professional analysis for the intelligence input on future, significant foreign policy decisions. This is particularly important in an era of unilateralist intervention in which all the external constraints that would be placed on an administration by internationalist coordination, cooperation and containment have been removed. French reasoning is trouble all the way.

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA station chief who served in Lebanon and Iran among other places and was at one time the agency’s chief of counterterrorism. He lives in Williston.

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On the road to chaos

Posted in Iraq on February 11, 2003|

[Originally published in the Rutland Herald.]

Colin Powell has spoken to America, the United Nations and the world. The reaction so far shows that he hasn’t changed many minds. His presentation seems unlikely to convince doubting Security Council members other than Great Britain that they should support an immediate U.S.-led war on Iraq. So we are left with the options of letting the U.N. inspection process play out or going virtually unilaterally into Iraq without U.N. support.

It is not difficult to understand the administration’s motivation on terrorism. We have been badly mauled by a bunch of people who hate us, and we are in the process of denying them a future. Most Americans would probably agree with this policy.

The Bush administration’s motivation on Iraq is not as clear. The administration asserts that the Iraqis threaten us because one day, and it is unclear when, they or their surrogates may pose a threat to America with biological and chemical weapons, as well as with nuclear weapons and delivery systems that they do not now possess.

The Bush administration seems to prefer to go it alone on Iraq despite the fact that the post-war results of an attack unsanctioned by the U.N. are potentially disastrous. Motivation is often very difficult to perceive. In this case, even though just about everyone agrees on the evils of Iraq, many abroad do not see a compelling reason for the extraordinary haste shown in the Bush administration’s policy. That may provide some insight into administration motivation on this issue.

The U.S. government’s analytical community pretty much agrees that a unilateral attack on Iraq has potentially disastrous results for the United States. Even the professional military has major reservations. Such an attack is very likely to create massive instability in a part of the world that is inherently unstable. Iraqi Kurds and Shiites will likely go their own way, tempting or inviting fellow Kurds and Shiites in Iran and Turkey, Central Asia and Syria to join them. This will create instability in all those countries, countries that are already deeply involved with fundamentalism, as well as in “moderate” countries in the Arab world. It is likely to spill over into Pakistan and, therefore, India (both nuclear powers) and into Central Asia, where Islamic fundamentalism has all the right objective conditions to prosper. The same is likely to happen in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Kuwait and the gulf states, where the objective conditions of regimes out of touch with their subjects are equally as favorable to Islamic fundamentalists.

Unilateral attack not sanctioned by the United Nations is likely to strengthen radical Islamic fundamentalism, create more anti-American terrorists, tell the world that preemptive strikes are acceptable, further marginalize the United Nations, create problems for NATO and precipitate a protracted struggle between Islam and the secular West.

The result of such an attack may very well turn out to be total chaos. Moderate Muslim Arab states may fall to fundamentalist pressures, creating an environment in which any thought of representative government or democracy will be anathema to those fundamentalists, whose religious beliefs not only provide them with a way of life, but also with a model for civil government a model that is anything but democratic and representative.

The thoughts above are those of many Middle East experts within the government. Obviously, those positions are being overlooked or rejected by this administration for its own political reasons. No matter how you look at it, you have to come back to the premise that administration policymakers have been told, or know, or at least assume that this policy will lead to chaos in the region. Chaos may also support those in the administration who would like to see the United States more in control of the flow of money to terrorists and think chaos and U.S. occupation would make that possible. Parenthetically, chaos will certainly forward the goals of Osama bin Laden and radical Islam for long-term conflict between the theocratic Muslim and secular Western worlds.

Whatever the reasons, unilateral attack is likely to create chaos in the Arab world, particularly if this is the first move in a new American policy designed to attack all Arab states that do not agree with U.S. policy. It almost certainly will meet the goals of the Likudists. Under this scenario, the United States (and Israel) will rule the Middle East. On the odd chance that it works, the Arab threat to Israel will be gone. A simplistic policy for a complicated world!

As implausible as it may sound, the only logic in this illogical situation has both sides heading toward chaos, al-Qaida hoping for a protracted holy war and the United States hoping that this will somehow control terrorism and put the United States more in charge that region. A more sober interpretation might be that even if we are successful, we will be faced with the largest, ugliest, most unmanageable and expensive military occupation in recorded history. U.N. backing would obviate most of these problems.

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA station chief who served in Eastern and Western Europe, Lebanon and Iran and was chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism staff. He lives in Williston.

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