First, a picture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ford_meets_with_Rumsfeld_a... That's Don Rumsfeld and his golden boy Dick Cheney, shortly after Don brought Dick on board at the White House. There's a lot of history there, but basically, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld were pretty key in the day-to-day operations of the Ford White House. One of the things they did a lot of was dealing with Seymour Hersh and the peccadilloes of the CIA, which was at a nadir. Pentagon Papers, MKULTRA, Ivy Bells, Family Jewels (look 'em all up)... the CIA had been a clusterfuck of an operation for a long goddamn time. Know who Rumsfeld and Cheney brought on board to clean up the mess? George H. W. Bush. He lasted a grand total of 357 days and, by anyone's account, was really good at his job as Director of Central Intelligence. He was excelling at turning the CIA around and got on well with Jimmy Carter, but... Well, first, a rumination. Since the days of Wild Bill Donovan, the American intelligence community has rawked at IMINT (IMage INTelligence), SIGINT (SIGnals INTelligence) and ELINT (ELectronic INTelligence) and sucked horrible, sweaty donkey balls at HUMINT (HUMan INTelligence). IMINT, SIGINT and ELINT are things you can build a better mousetrap for. Our spy satellites are beyond compare and ECHELON is an impressive damn network. When it comes to secret agents in the field listening to whispers, on the other hand, we totally blow. We killed something like 3,000 emigres by giving them parachutes and dropping them behind the Iron Curtain to, well, do mischief (there wasn't much more instruction than that) and the Soviets knew where they were before they landed. In fact, the "Holy Grail" of American foreign policy is the Kennan "Long Telegram" in which our guy in Moscow burned 8000 words basically saying "the Russians are nuts, our best move is to stop talking to them and contain their spread." No shit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_F._Kennan#The_.22long_te... So. You've got Don Rumsfeld, you've got Dick Cheney and you've got George W Bush's dad, and they're the Masters of the Universe, and the CIA is a mess and they've got intelligence problems all over the place but they've got it under control... ...and then Ford lost the election, Carter fired GHWB and hired a crony who thought HUMINT was a waste of time, fired 800 people and generally sucked at life. Whatever corrections GHWB had made were wiped out. The next guy, Bill Casey, thought the Soviets were terrorists and, not to put too fine a point on it, sold missiles to Iran to bankroll a narco-war in Nicaragua. Something Dick Cheney watched unfold in closed House subcommittees, by the way. Fast forward to Desert Storm. GHWB is president, Dick Cheney is Secretary of Defense. We roll into Iraq, and Dick Cheney is muthafuckin' gobsmacked by all the WMD Hussein had sitting around. The CIA dropped the ball big time on that one. Nerve gas, anthrax, uranium enrichment, superguns capable of launching satellites into orbit, you name it. Say what you will about the Gulf War, it was pretty eye-opening when we rolled in and discovered that Saddam Hussein was not fucking around on the WMD front and we knew fuckall about it. * * * So it's 2001. We've got a memo that says "Bin Laden Determined To Attack Within United States" but up to that point, "Bin Laden attack" meant a couple embassy bombings in Kenya and some dudes rubbing a shaped charge against a destroyer off the coast of Yemen. Taking out a couple skyscrapers was orders of magnitude more than they expected. Meanwhile, the CIA is busy being useless. Donald Rumsfeld had been Reagan's "special envoy to the middle east" (that's when that shot with him and Hussein was taken - he was the CEO of Searle at the time) and Dick Cheney was pretty well convinced that the crazy mutherfucker who set his own oil wells on fire, whom he'd recommended wiping out in '91, was responsible. I mean, c'mon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Babylon So what you're left with are some clever dudes who are breathtakingly aware of the blindness of the CIA (and have been for 25 years) and stark, personal examples of what a dangerous mutherfucker Saddam Hussein was. Meanwhile, they've got exquisite satellite photos showing them the same nothing-from-space they had in '91 and the same piss-poor HUMINT they've always had, so they're borrowing from Israel and Great Britain, same as they have since 1939, but since '91 neither of them have many boots-on-ground in Iraq either. It really comes down to this: The guys with the power to decide had no reason to trust the information they had, so they went with their gut. Their gut, as we all know now, was wrong. * * * I'm no fan of Cheney and Rumsfeld. I think they should be rotting in cells. I think the problem is bigger than ideology, though. So much of American foreign policy and, by extension, world politics is driven by our simple failure to understand the world around us because given a choice between listening to whispers or peeping through keyholes, we'll peep through keyholes (our spy satellites carry the designation "KH" which stands for, literally, "Key Hole"). There's only so much you can learn by looking at something; at some point you have to ask the right questions. We've never learned how. American foreign policy, since the Zimmerman Telegram, has been run by bureaucrats who can only observe their adversaries from space (figuratively and literally). When you examine history through that lens, it all makes sense. Further reading: http://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Ashes-History-Tim-Weiner/dp/038... http://www.amazon.com/Cold-War-New-History/dp/0143038273/ref...
