US
INTELLIGENCE GREATEST FAILURE EVER 
At the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom the United States
has achieved a very quick and easy victory in the strict military sense of the
word. And then, everything, or almost
everything went wrong. Thus, the post-war phase of the Iraq operation has
already had astronomical consequences, very negative that is.
From almost the very beginning of the US provisional
authority period (or occupation if you like) there is one and only one big
issue that dragged the effort down. A
very well organized and effective guerrilla resistance operated by former
Baathist and Iraqi intelligence structures.
That’s the answer of Saddam’s regime US intelligence hadn’t predicted and
warned about, and the US military hadn’t prepared for and proved incapable of
effectively dealing with. It allowed Al Qaeda’s own operation to take off and
be pretty successful there as well.
It was the killings of Iraqis lining up in front of police
stations, everyday murders of newly appointed Iraqi government officials, disrupting oil
production and the power grip, stirring up significant tensions along ethnic
and religious lines as well as the effective ways of killing US military here
and there that dragged the effort down and led to:
- Series of big propaganda victories for the insurgency, Al Qaeda’s operation in Iraq
and all sorts of other jihadists
- Political and PR disaster for the concept of exporting
democracy throughout the world:
A. Giving tons and
tons of ammunition to the deranged and
extreme left throughout the West, both in the US and Europe. Even if Iraq wouldn’t turn up another Vietnam in the end of
the day, the political opposition to the concept of defending, exporting and
expanding democracy throughout the world was enhanced to an unprecedented
extent.
B. Even worse, the entire US Democratic party establishment
was forced to pander to its extreme left, anti-war component and parrot their
ideological and psychological issues as their own political agenda.
C. Key allies, such as UK’s Tony Blair had to pay a
tremendous political price for his support to the war effort and future support
for similar endeavors will be unlikely to be expected unless the conservative
party takes over in Britain.
- Effective halt on any serious efforts to spread
democracy in the region:
A. Syria got very scared initially (they even voted “for” at
the UNSC) but then, once the US proved incapable of coping with the insurgency,
Damascus became instrumental and even
arrogant both in Iraq and Lebanon. The regime there is as stable as before.
B. Iran seemed to have
halted its nuclear program at the time (if the last 2007 NIE is to be
believed, see below), but since the US got into trouble in Iraq, the mullahs became more
and more aggressive – the fact alone that they picked up such a provocative
puppet as Ahmadinejad (who threatens to wipe Israel off the map about once a
month) speaks for itself. The concept of dealing with Iran (and North Korea) as
the other two unacceptable rogue regimes is put on hold indefinitely.
C. In such a weak position, that the US has been in since
2003, they couldn’t/can’t apply any effective pressure whatsoever on the
“friendly” regimes of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, etc. to become more democratic. Those are
perfectly aware that the US government desperately needs their cooperation and
won’t risk alienating them with real pressure for more democracy.
- Tremendous cost in lives and treasure, straining the military, straining US economy,
that affects negatively the entire world economy
- Giving the malignant regime in Russia an opportunity
to recover after their strategic losses at the end of the last century – losing
their hold on the Balkans and Eastern Europe; suffering from the anti-KGB
intelligence coup (the book of the KGB archivist that totally undermined their
reputation for keeping secrets in the eyes of their potential recruits); as
well as the terrible economic predicament Russia was in at the beginning of the
century. Now the Russian quasi-totalitarian regime is back on its feet
gathering strength.
None of this
tremendously negative effects would have been around (not to the extent they
are anyway), had the US been able to crush the Baathist insurgency and achieve
quick and clean post-invasion victory over the guerrilla resistance.
In theory, we can’t be sure whether, even if US intelligence
had predicted and seriously warned the decision makers of the guerrilla answer,
and the US military had prepared to deal with such an guerrilla/terrorism
response, that it would have been particularly successful.
Simply because by definition it is very difficult to deal
with guerrilla tactics.
But it would obviously not have been as disastrous as it
happened to be.
Now, that we are finally witnessing the effort of somebody
who specialized in anti-guerilla tactics (gen. Petreaus) we are getting a
pretty clear clue that it might have been very different 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006 if US intelligence had
correctly predicted the former Iraqi regime’s guerrilla response.
So, the big
question is: Could the former Iraqi regime guerrilla answer have been figured out by intelligence analysts in time?
Yes it could have and easily, at that. And that’s what makes
it even more difficult to swallow all this Iraq mess.
For the following simple and obvious reasons:
1. Intelligence
communities are perfectly aware of the fact that the guerrilla tactics in
Vietnam proved so successful, damaged the US so badly that the Kremlin couldn’t
believe its luck. Since then, the idea of having the US trapped in another
guerrilla nightmare has been deeply engraved in Russian strategic thinking. This
is both obvious and confirmed by Soviet defectors.
The whole set of carnages in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s
was set up not by Milosevic, but by his puppet masters in Moscow. They were the
ones who needed at the time to get the US and NATO involved in another
potential Vietnam – on a territory so comfortably and fully controlled by the
Russians as then Yugoslavia.
This is why Bush 41 declared he wouldn’t get involved with
troops in Yugoslavia and didn't. This is why when he was handing over the White
House keys to Bill Clinton, he advised him to do the same.
It took Clinton many, many years to take the plunge and get
involved militarily, in a full blown military operation – Kosovo 1999. Prior to
the war, key Serbian functionaries, such as the war criminal Radovan Karajich, warned the US and NATO – if
you come after us, you’ll get yourself into another Vietnam. The Serbs had their paramilitary
forces fully trained for guerrilla warfare there. That’s why during the entire
course of the Kosovo war (70+ days) -
the question, racking the minds of the entire Russian establishment and their
neo-communist structures throughout the Balkans was – will the US (and NATO)
enter the territory with ground troops, so we hopefully set them up into
another Vietnam quagmire?
At the time I had befriended a journalist of probably the most KGB controlled newspaper in my country who not only wrote on foreign affairs but some important KGB disinformation campaigns (known as "active measures" in Soviet intelligence jargon) were started by her typewriter. Every time I met or talked to her on the phone, she asked me - is the US going to launch a ground operation in Kosovo? That was the 1 trillion question.
And the US was sending mixed signals all along. A resounding and resolute "maybe". We may, or we
may not. For all these 70+ days. Time and time again. Teasing the enemy.
And they never did. They just bombed the hell out of
Milosevic from pretty safe and comfortable altitudes. Only after NATO signed a
truce with the Serbs (who agreed to withdraw from Kosovo), did the US (and
NATO) put their boots on the hostile, totalitarian ground.
So, the concept of setting the US up to another Vietnam
through guerrilla warfare tactics was at the very center of this whole East-West
thing long after the so-called cold war was officially proclaimed over.
2. Who (among
US or whatever other intelligence community) didn’t know that Saddam’s
totalitarian regime was an Arab variation of Soviet communism, with Moscow and
all its satellites cooperating very closely with Saddam?
Exchanging
intelligence, selling weapon systems (violating the UN arms embargo), trying to
help Saddam out in the UN and in any other possible way. Setting up schemes to
outfox the sanctions, the oil-for-food charade. It was obvious at power two that they would advise Saddam that
his best option is to set up a guerrilla operation in case the US goes after
him.
Russian intelligence informed Saddam in the summer of 2002 that
in their opinion the US would go after the Iraqi regime. We know this now from
documents, with the benefit of hindsight. But how obvious is that for anybody
following those issues, anyway? For intelligence people this is supposed to be
abc stuff.
If Moscow shared with Saddam their intelligence assessment
whether the US is determined to go after Saddam, then they certainly would
express their opinion what is the best way to respond to a US invasion. What
would this advice be, provided the thinking, the experience and successes the Russians had
had with guerrilla tactics, both against other enemies and the US in particular?
So, how come US intelligence could not figure out the
obvious?
The answer to this question is known to those people inside
the US (and UK) intelligence community who were supposed to make the correct
predictions. Nobody seems to hold them responsible for their gaffe, at least
not publicly.
Two things are obvious, however:
A. The analytical
approach, laid out above would be announced as old, cold-war mentality and this
is so not trendy these days, so old-fashioned, so backwards, even within
intelligence agencies. Hadn't the cold war ended somewhere shortly after the
pleistocene? What is this dinosaur talking about?
The fact that the mass media pinheads (from all these CNN's,
Newsweeks, Times and New York Times) declared the end of the cold war doesn’t
make it so. The fact that politicians did the same as well, for diplomatic
reasons (to court the Russians into moving to a less malignant political model,
hopefully resembling democracy) doesn’t make it so as well.
A true, factual end of the cold war could happen only when
the facts on the ground change substantively. Only after the malignant quasi-totalitarian
regime in Russia gets transformed into a real democracy would we be able to
talk about a real end of the cold war. No such thing happened either under
Gorbachev (in the 80s) or under Yeltsin (90's). Certainly not under the current mouthpiece
of Russian security establishment.
As long as they have all these WMDs and their oceans of oil
and gas, and their permanent seat and veto power at the UN Security Council,
they will remain a very important international player. As long as combined
with those realities Russia remains a dictatorship regime that differs from its previous Soviet
form only cosmetically, they will be a very big problem around.
Whether mass media pushovers, politicians and diplomats
choose to call it “cold war”, new realities, democratic Russia, détente, it
doesn't matter. Since Soviet times, the regime in Russia adopted only cosmetic
changes to deceive Western public opinion, and hopefully intelligence
headquarters and political establishments.
For reasons known as political correctness, it seems that
they have finally succeeded.
In our case, remembering the true nature of the current Russian
regime, with its still malignant priorities would have helped US intelligence
figure out and prepared for the robust guerrilla resistance of the remnants of
Saddam’s barbaric regime. But they chose not to.
Go figure.
Spy Games
