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This book examines the intellectual frameworks within which the case for war in Iraq has developed in the US and the UK. It analyzes the neoconservative roots of the decision to go to war. The book also analyzes the humanitarian intervention rationale that was developed in the context of the Kosovo campaign, Tony Blair's presentation of it, and the case of Iraq. It looks at the parallel processes through which the George Bush administration and Blair government constructed their cases for war, analyzing similarities and divergences in approach. The book considers the loci of the intelligence failure over Iraq, the lessons for the intelligence communities, and the degree to which the decision to go to war in Iraq represented a policy rather than an intelligence failure. It then complements the analyses of US prewar intelligence failures by analysing what post-war inquiries have revealed about the nature of the failure in the UK case. The book discusses the relationship between intelligence and policymaking. It looks at how US Congress dealt with intelligence before the war. The book also examines how the Bush administration tried to manage public opinion in support of its war policies. It then looks at the decisionmaking process of the Bush administration in the year before the war in Iraq. Finally, the book also provides excerpts from a number of speeches and documents which are key to understanding the nature of national security decisionmaking and intelligence failure.
The intelligence community’s uneven performance on Iraq from 2002 to 2004 raised significant questions concerning the condition of intelligence collection, analysis, and policy support. The discussion of shortcomings and failures that follows is not meant to imply that all surprises can be prevented by even good intelligence. There are too many targets and too many ways of
intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community’s own work was politicized. As the national intelligence officer responsible for the Middle East from 2000 to 2005, I witnessed all of these disturbing developments. Public discussion of prewar intelligence on Iraq has
private revolution at home and reduction of England to a second class power’. 7 Such pessimism may also have existed in the intelligence community. In a report on the post-war organisation of British codebreaking, William ‘Nobby’ Clarke of GC&CS (soon to be officially renamed the Government Communications Headquarters) explained that one ‘potential danger’ to Britain’s ability to read
relevant intelligence data concerning threats to the homeland,” and the WMD Commission remarks that the terminology we use may implicitly accept undesirable boundaries within the intelligence community: “To say that we must encourage agencies to ‘share’ information implies that they have some ownership stake in it.” 11 Anyone who has worked in or around CIA knows the proprietary attitude of the
Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction. Our unanimous report is based on a lengthy investigation, during which we interviewed hundreds of experts from inside and outside the Intelligence Community and reviewed thousands of documents. Our report offers 74 recommendations for improving the US Intelligence Community (all but a handful of which we believe can be
National Archives provides a ‘somewhat constrained’ view of Cold War intelligence. 23 The argument that the authorities release their own ‘carefully packaged’ version of the past may be overly suspicious. Sir Stephen Lander, during his time as Director General of the Security Service, spoke of a widespread awareness across the intelligence community that they ‘did not own the past and
perception expanded to challenges posed by sub-nationalism and a rising armed insurgency in Punjab. In many ways, B. Raman, one of the early Indian Police Service officers to be picked by Kao to join the R&AW, captures this suspicion of the U.S. within the Indian security establishment. Naturally, the intelligence community was equally vulnerable to this hostility, and, on occasion, it was also on the front lines of this conflict. India and the U.S. had moved quickly from the high of 1962–64 to a new low in a relationship
States to war for flimsy reasons. We agree that the war of choice in Iraq was ill-advised and wrong headed. But your lament that you are a victim in a process you helped direct is self-serving, misleading and, as head of the intelligence community, an admission of failed leadership. You were not a victim. You were a willing participant in a poorly considered policy to start an unnecessary war and you
in both countries to determine why there had been such an enormous intelligence failure. In the US, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), controlled by the Republicans, investigated and concluded that the intelligence process had failed and no inappropriate pressure had been placed on the intelligence community by the Bush administration. Subsequently, an independent commission, the Robb-Silberman Commission