The information gathered is derived from many sources. Much is speculative, some is contradictory. It often amounts to little more than hunches. Some is correct, much is not.
A lot like your essay.
Derived of many sources, much of it is speculative. Mostly incorrect.
Most of what you say that is correct is correct only from a purely pedantic point of view. "Intelligence" has more than one meaning.
Allow me to correct many of your errors - and you're welcome.
The Taliban is not local Afghanis; they were outside panislamists who descended upon A'stan during the Soviet occupation and who waged Mujahideen jihad against them. When the Soviets left, a portion of the panislamists who came to repel the Russians stayed and set up camp in the power vacuum. ...using the same occupation model as the Soviets [and British] used, by the way.
That occupation model, for what it's worth, is to select one of the dozen or so tribal affiliations as their proxy and legitimacy for rule. The "Northern Alliance" was the collection of remaining tribal affiliations united against the Talibanic proxy and their Taliban puppeteers.
Most of the issues with US intelligence is that we rely too heavily on technical methods rather than HumInt. ...human intelligence. HumInt is essentially hiring [or training] a turncoat to infiltrate an organization, or hiring a floozy to get a target horizontal and talking. In the Sensitive Seventies, under Carter, we decided we were too righteous for HumInt; Reagan and Bush loved high-tech toys, and Clinton didn't want to dirty his hands... by Bush the Younger, we were so out of practice that nothing was going to work.
The mother of all intelligence failures, of course, was the CIA's inaccurate prediction that Saddam Hussein's regime would be found to have weapons of mass destruction.
Here's the thing: he did.
The UN found - literally - boatloads of chemical weapons during their inspections between '92 and late '98. Mostly artillery shells of the kind used in the Iran-Iraq war, and against their own Kurds. These chemical shells were stored in UN-controlled warehouses in various places in Iraq awaiting incineration.
In late '98, just after the UN keystone kops stumbled into the ricin factory, Iraq famously "requested" the UN to vacate the country and Clinton embarked on his "Blue Dress War". The UN was gone from Iraq from late '98 until late '02. One of the first things the UN did when they returned to Iraq was to check out all those UN-controlled warehouses they'd stored those chemical artillery shells 4 years before.
Empty.
If you have teenagers, or ever was one yourself, you know the most likely causes of this:
- moved and hidden
- given to someone else for safe-keeping
- used
These are the standard options when one parent finds a joint at the back of the sock drawer and promises to "discuss this when your father comes home".
If #3 had occured, someone would have caught wind of it.
Numbers 1 and 2 are most likely and - as you undoubtedly watch Powell's UN presentation, if only to sneer - the US had that high-tech intel that Iraq had been doing either/both 1 & 2 since '99, and in somewhat of a particular frenzy since Bush the Younger started rattling sabers in early '02.
The question is not so much "DID Hussein have chemical weapons?" as it was "Where'd they go?" Cuz they were there in '98.
Now, your cynical self is going to claim some form or other of grand rationalization wherein chemical weapons are not really chemical weapons when it comes to embarrassing US Intel; save it. They were there in '98; they were gone in '02. We both know better than to believe Hussein incinerated on his own what he had just spent seven years trying to hide from the UN Narcs. They were given away or hidden, or both.
To be realistic, the likelihood that any of them were still usable as chemical weapons per se is about nil. Chemical weapons must be stored in rigidly climate-controlled conditions. Too much temperature, too much humidity, can render the chemical agent inert. You may as well blow up a 20-pound sack of flour over your enemy's heads for all the good it would likely do. But that notwithstanding, Iraq had hundreds in '98 which were missing in '02.
The United States of America tortures prisoners to acquire intelligence
Really? What did this "torture" consist of? And where is this act defined by authoritative law, treaty or protocol as "torture"?
Answers: no; irrelevant; none.
Liberals, pacifists and other self-loathers have attempted to make bales and bales of hay on "torture" without understanding what it actually is. Sure, the GenCons prohibit it, but what IS it?
You find me an internationally accepted definition of torture and I will show you a definition of torture that not one nation had agreed to abide by. That was the problem 80 years ago when the GenCons were being drafted; that's the problem now.
The International Red Cross/Crescent has a definition of torture; Amnesty International has one; Doctors Without Borders probably does; every weed-sprouting group of do-gooders playing Junior Self-Important Diplomat has one as well. But there is no definition of torture that the nations of the world have agreed on by actually signing their name to the document.
None.
So the GenCons prohibit torture, but leave the definition empty - what then is "torture"?
In short, it is whatever each individual nation decides it is. Formally. Not in some shouted-from-the-campus-quad assertion, but under its own precedural rules for deciding such things. As you undoubtedly recall, Bush the Younger ordered several procedural changes made to military justice rules in '02. That in itself got a whole bunch of unpopular press at the time. One of those changes was - you guessed it.
For what it's worth, Barama has ordered those changes made right back. So we're at some sort of "square one", for all intents and purposes. But the GenCons only require that we do not commit what we consider to be torture.
And we didn't. No matter how much of a hissy fit anyone wants to throw in the grocery store aisle, the US - between '02 and '09 - was not commiting torture.
That said, some methods of interrogation work less well than others. And while "torture" may be notionalized as "things which don't work well in interrogation", the threat of "torture", instead, works very well indeed. ...as has been known for millenia. But our lack of effective threat is part of the "too righteous to play the game" of HumInt.
How many times have we heard that the US must, for some strange reason, be "better than" the rest of the world? Warfare is very, very, very clearly the domain of international treaties and protocols, yet we have declared that Constitutional Rights be extended to those captured in hostile action. "It's only right".
Name one other nation which does so? Don't bother trying; you can't.
Name one other country which would have undergone the many, many paroxysms of spasmic self-loathing that we have because - boo hoo - some people that had been trying to kill its soldiers got their faces wet - upside-down. None.
France is doing that [and more] right now in a half dozen western and central African countries and you don't see Le Monde criticizing the French Foreign Legion for it. You see them criticizing the CIA for Gitmo. - which is another part of the game. Americans don't realize that one of the rules is that everyone claims: "We can do it; you can't". A great big, collosal neener-neener. Everyone does it; it means nothing. ...except to American neophytes.
The French people don't go getting all teary-eyed because their military runs around the world being bossy and rude. American people do. Is that cuz we're "more moral"? "more sensitive"?
Or is it simply because we are too unsuited to world leadership? ...cuz this is what world-leading nations, kingdoms and empires have done since Day Two of human civilization. Either play the game the way it needs to be played, or get the hell off the top of the dung pile.
"Old Europe" is right about that: America isn't well-suited to world leadership. Because its people get queasy far too easily.
When a nation as powerful as the United States goes to war on the basis of bad information...
Which war was that?
Don't say Iraq, either. You only believe the reason for the war was intel; it was cease fire violations and manpower issues. You believe what you believe because you were played.
The US had over 100K troops devoted to the UN program of babysitting Hussein. Remember the "Peace Dividend"? All those troops, no Soviet Menace to line up against. "Sure, we'll babysit Hussein for ya! Glad to!"
Countless RIFs later, we've got a far smaller military force [and even smaller in terms of battle-ready units] and a disproportionate share of them were sitting with their thumbs up their ass in the Saudi and Kuwaiti sand. ...and Turkey... and Bahrain... and Qatar... and ships in the Gulf and Mediterranean.
But then, golly, someone knocks down a few of our buildings from their safe haven in A'stan, and we suddenly need front-line troops - a lot of them are scattered in babysitting brigades in Korea/Okinawa/Japan, and in Bosnia, and in Kosovo, and in Kuwait/Saudi.
Kuwait/Saudi is the closest, so they'd be the obvious choice. So, "Okay, UN Security Council? May we please have our troops back?"
Their answer was summed up by the French, who have loved to interfere with us since before the end of WWII: "Non!"
"Can we have part of them back?"
"Non!"
"Well, can we disengage from Korea?"
"Sure, if it doesn't destabilize the region..." ...which is a sucker-bet. Every time the US does anything, Li'l Kim goes whining to his state press agency that the US is about ready to nuke them. Start a joint military exercize with the SKorean army? it's only because we're going to nuke them. ...ditto with the japanese Navy? we're about to nuke. Leave the area altogether? ...nuke...
Everything destabilizes the region. We're in Korea until hell freezes over.
We can leave Kuwait/Saudi if Hussein is deposed, however ... may not be easy, but it'd be possible. Hussein had been in daily if not hourly violation of the cease fire terms since they were ratified; any violation, even non-belligerent and nominal, is an Act of War under IntLaw protocols - it's why France and Britain could have invaded Nazi Germany in '34 or whatever if they'd chosen, in response to Germany remilitarizing the Rhineland.
Take a cease fire violation, use it as a Casus Belli, distract We The People with scary stories based in political desire - as if fear-mongering were invented in '03 by the clumsy and unclever Bush the Younger - and hope for the best.
That 'best', again, relies on intel, however, and the reason ours is so faulty and hole-y is that there's almost no HumInt involved - we're too "moral" and "sensitive" to hire slimeballs and whores to do our bidding - and so there were no flowery parades, and Iran and Syria used the pretense of the US invasion to start competing power-plays of their own. We couldn't get out.
Or, more accurately, wouldn't get out. Because we're too nice to run an occupation the way occupations have historically been run. Neophytes with a class of PoliSci under their belts march around the Quad chanting too many newsworthy slogans to allow that to happen.
We have squandered thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars, we have projected force without intelligence—and that is folly. . . . That is how nations fall and that is how nations lose power
Nations lose power by being unable to project force. When a nation loses the will to project, it will be seen as unable to by others [whether true or not], and that will [not "can", not "might", WILL] cause others with a vested interest in toppling the Top Dog [i.e., almost everyone else] to nip at the heels, snipe at the borders, etc. The age-old Chinese notion of "death by a thousand cuts". Think Western Rome.
A nation, kingdom or empire which projects force is vital and expanding. A nation which stops doing so - for whatever reason - is on the downhill slide.
Nations fall because of the same primary reasons that marriages fail:
- money
- in-fighting
No matter how many billions anyone wishes to tally attributable to the War in Iraq, we were already spending a significant portion of that just babysitting, and if we cut back on other things it could have been done. We didn't cut back.
We're cutting back even less now. Fiscal irresponsibility will be a far more likely cause of our dusty entry into history books than wars you don't and didn't understand. Think Isle de France.
Partisan hackery and self-righteousness is an even bigger reason for a nation's failure. And probably the closest historical analog to modern US history is Byzantine posturing around the time the Turkish invasions got into high gear. Turkish raiders had been sniping at the frontiers for a few hundred years - burning farms, carting off women and [other] livestock from the rich lands of Anatolia. But the amount of damage done was perceived as "tolerable".
Enter the official Turkish army sweeping out of central Asia, conquering what the Arabs under muslim righteousness had conquered and squabbled away after Mohammed's death. The Byzantines were a neatly divided empire - the "rednecks" from the Balkans and Greek region, and the rich Anatolians.
It was more important to the rich Anatolians that a rich Anatolian be in charge of the place than a redneck from the wrong side of the Hellespont, and so when the redneck general devised the plan to trap and decimate the Turkish Army, which was flying cover for the Turkish raiders, Anatolian second-in-command took his share of the troops and went home. ...to a hero's welcome. The redneck general who stayed fought the Turks to a draw at Manzikert, was captured himself and set free to the popular derision of the Byzantine "money".
Because of Manzikert, a large portion of the empire was outright ceded to the invaders. And with the willing participation of the Anatolians - it was better to lose the war against pesky invaders running roughshod over them, and become foreign subjects than "suffer" a victory by the "wrong kind of leader".
It doesn't take too much comparative analysis to see the very, very eerie parallels to our recent history.
