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   *Intelligence, Policy,and the War in Iraq*
   By Paul R. Pillar
   Foreign Affairs

   March/April 2006 Issue

   *A Dysfunctional Relationship*

   The most serious problem with US intelligence today is that its
relationship with the policymaking process is broken and badly needs
repair. In the wake of the Iraq war, it has become clear that official
intelligence analysis was not relied on in making even the most
significant national security decisions, that 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 focused on the
errors made in assessing Saddam Hussein's unconventional weapons
programs. A commission chaired by Judge Laurence Silberman and former
Senator Charles Robb usefully documented the intelligence community's
mistakes in a solid and comprehensive report released in March 2005.
Corrections were indeed in order, and the intelligence community has
begun to make them.

   At the same time, an acrimonious and highly partisan debate broke
out over whether the Bush administration manipulated and misused
intelligence in making its case for war. The administration defended
itself by pointing out that it was not alone in its view that Saddam had
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and active weapons programs, however
mistaken that view may have been.

   In this regard, the Bush administration was quite right: its
perception of Saddam's weapons capacities was shared by the Clinton
administration, congressional Democrats, and most other Western
governments and intelligence services. But in making this defense, the
White House also inadvertently pointed out the real problem:
intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs did not drive its decision to go
to war. A view broadly held in the United States and even more so
overseas was that deterrence of Iraq was working, that Saddam was being
kept "in his box," and that the best way to deal with the weapons
problem was through an aggressive inspections program to supplement the
sanctions already in place. That the administration arrived at so
different a policy solution indicates that its decision to topple Saddam
was driven by other factors - namely, the desire to shake up the
sclerotic power structures of the Middle East and hasten the spread of
more liberal politics and economics in the region.

   If the entire body of official intelligence analysis on Iraq had a
policy implication, it was to avoid war - or, if war was going to be
launched, to prepare for a messy aftermath. What is most remarkable
about prewar US intelligence on Iraq is not that it got things wrong and
thereby misled policymakers; it is that it played so small a role in one
of the most important US policy decisions in recent decades.

   *A Model Upended*

   The proper relationship between intelligence gathering and
policymaking sharply separates the two functions. The intelligence
community collects information, evaluates its credibility, and combines
it with other information to help make sense of situations abroad that
could affect US interests. Intelligence officers decide which topics
should get their limited collection and analytic resources according to
both their own judgments and the concerns of policymakers. Policymakers
thus influence which topics intelligence agencies address but not the
conclusions that they reach. The intelligence community, meanwhile,
limits its judgments to what is happening or what might happen overseas,
avoiding policy judgments about what the United States should do in
response.

   In practice, this distinction is often blurred, especially because
analytic projections may have policy implications even if they are not
explicitly stated. But the distinction is still important. National
security abounds with problems that are clearer than the solutions to
them; the case of Iraq is hardly a unique example of how similar
perceptions of a threat can lead people to recommend very different
policy responses. Accordingly, it is critical that the intelligence
community not advocate policy, especially not openly. If it does, it
loses the most important basis for its credibility and its claims to
objectivity. When intelligence analysts critique one another's work,
they use the phrase "policy prescriptive" as a pejorative, and rightly so.

   The Bush administration's use of intelligence on Iraq did not just
blur this distinction; it turned the entire model upside down. The
administration used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to
justify a decision already made. It went to war without requesting - and
evidently without being influenced by - any strategic-level intelligence
assessments on any aspect of Iraq. (The military made extensive use of
intelligence in its war planning, although much of it was of a more
tactical nature.) Congress, not the administration, asked for the
now-infamous October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's
unconventional weapons programs, although few members of Congress
actually read it. (According to several congressional aides responsible
for safeguarding the classified material, no more than six senators and
only a handful of House members got beyond the five-page executive
summary.) As the national intelligence officer for the Middle East, I
was in charge of coordinating all of the intelligence community's
assessments regarding Iraq; the first request I received from any
administration policymaker for any such assessment was not until a year
into the war.

   Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed, but even
with its flaws, it was not what led to the war. On the issue that
mattered most, the intelligence community judged that Iraq probably was
several years away from developing a nuclear weapon. The October 2002
NIE also judged that Saddam was unlikely to use WMD against the United
States unless his regime was placed in mortal danger.

   Before the war, on its own initiative, the intelligence community
considered the principal challenges that any postinvasion authority in
Iraq would be likely to face. It presented a picture of a political
culture that would not provide fertile ground for democracy and foretold
a long, difficult, and turbulent transition. It projected that a
Marshall Plan-type effort would be required to restore the Iraqi
economy, despite Iraq's abundant oil resources. It forecast that in a
deeply divided Iraqi society, with Sunnis resentful over the loss of
their dominant position and Shiites seeking power commensurate with
their majority status, there was a significant chance that the groups
would engage in violent conflict unless an occupying power prevented it.
And it anticipated that a foreign occupying force would itself be the
target of resentment and attacks - including by guerrilla warfare -
unless it established security and put Iraq on the road to prosperity in
the first few weeks or months after the fall of Saddam.

   In addition, the intelligence community offered its assessment of
the likely regional repercussions of ousting Saddam. It argued that any
value Iraq might have as a democratic exemplar would be minimal and
would depend on the stability of a new Iraqi government and the extent
to which democracy in Iraq was seen as developing from within rather
than being imposed by an outside power. More likely, war and occupation
would boost political Islam and increase sympathy for terrorists'
objectives - and Iraq would become a magnet for extremists from
elsewhere in the Middle East.

   *Standard Deviations*

   The Bush administration deviated from the professional standard not
only in using policy to drive intelligence, but also in aggressively
using intelligence to win public support for its decision to go to war.
This meant selectively adducing data - "cherry-picking" - rather than
using the intelligence community's own analytic judgments. In fact, key
portions of the administration's case explicitly rejected those
judgments. In an August 2002 speech, for example, Vice President Dick
Cheney observed that "intelligence is an uncertain business" and noted
how intelligence analysts had underestimated how close Iraq had been to
developing a nuclear weapon before the 1991 Persian Gulf War. His
conclusion - at odds with that of the intelligence community - was that
"many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons
fairly soon."

   In the upside-down relationship between intelligence and policy that
prevailed in the case of Iraq, the administration selected pieces of raw
intelligence to use in its public case for war, leaving the intelligence
community to register varying degrees of private protest when such use
started to go beyond what analysts deemed credible or reasonable. The
best-known example was the assertion by President George W. Bush in his
2003 State of the Union address that Iraq was purchasing uranium ore in
Africa. US intelligence analysts had questioned the credibility of the
report making this claim, had kept it out of their own unclassified
products, and had advised the White House not to use it publicly. But
the administration put the claim into the speech anyway, referring to it
as information from British sources in order to make the point without
explicitly vouching for the intelligence.

   The reexamination of prewar public statements is a necessary part of
understanding the process that led to the Iraq war. But a narrow focus
on rhetorical details tends to overlook more fundamental problems in the
intelligence-policy relationship. Any time policymakers, rather than
intelligence agencies, take the lead in selecting which bits of raw
intelligence to present, there is - regardless of the issue - a bias.
The resulting public statements ostensibly reflect intelligence, but
they do not reflect intelligence analysis, which is an essential part of
determining what the pieces of raw reporting mean. The policymaker acts
with an eye not to what is indicative of a larger pattern or underlying
truth, but to what supports his case.

   Another problem is that on Iraq, the intelligence community was
pulled over the line into policy advocacy - not so much by what it said
as by its conspicuous role in the administration's public case for war.
This was especially true when the intelligence community was made highly
visible (with the director of central intelligence literally in the
camera frame) in an intelligence-laden presentation by Secretary of
State Colin Powell to the UN Security Council a month before the war
began. It was also true in the fall of 2002, when, at the
administration's behest, the intelligence community published a white
paper on Iraq's WMD programs - but without including any of the
community's judgments about the likelihood of those weapons' being used.

   But the greatest discrepancy between the administration's public
statements and the intelligence community's judgments concerned not WMD
(there was indeed a broad consensus that such programs existed), but the
relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda. The enormous attention devoted
to this subject did not reflect any judgment by intelligence officials
that there was or was likely to be anything like the "alliance" the
administration said existed. The reason the connection got so much
attention was that the administration wanted to hitch the Iraq
expedition to the "war on terror" and the threat the American public
feared most, thereby capitalizing on the country's militant post-9/11 mood.

   The issue of possible ties between Saddam and al Qaeda was
especially prone to the selective use of raw intelligence to make a
public case for war. In the shadowy world of international terrorism,
almost anyone can be "linked" to almost anyone else if enough effort is
made to find evidence of casual contacts, the mentioning of names in the
same breath, or indications of common travels or experiences. Even the
most minimal and circumstantial data can be adduced as evidence of a
"relationship," ignoring the important question of whether a given
regime actually supports a given terrorist group and the fact that
relationships can be competitive or distrustful rather than cooperative.

   The intelligence community never offered any analysis that supported
the notion of an alliance between Saddam and al Qaeda. Yet it was drawn
into a public effort to support that notion. To be fair, Secretary
Powell's presentation at the UN never explicitly asserted that there was
a cooperative relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda. But the
presentation was clearly meant to create the impression that one
existed. To the extent that the intelligence community was a party to
such efforts, it crossed the line into policy advocacy - and did so in a
way that fostered public misconceptions contrary to the intelligence
community's own judgments.

   *Varities of Politicization*

   In its report on prewar intelligence concerning Iraqi WMD, the
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence said it found no evidence that
analysts had altered or shaped their judgments in response to political
pressure. The Silberman-Robb commission reached the same conclusion,
although it conceded that analysts worked in an "environment" affected
by "intense" policymaker interest. But the method of investigation used
by the panels - essentially, asking analysts whether their arms had been
twisted - would have caught only the crudest attempts at politicization.
Such attempts are rare and, when they do occur (as with former
Undersecretary of State John Bolton's attempts to get the intelligence
community to sign on to his judgments about Cuba and Syria), are almost
always unsuccessful. Moreover, it is unlikely that analysts would ever
acknowledge that their own judgments have been politicized, since that
would be far more damning than admitting more mundane types of analytic
error.

   The actual politicization of intelligence occurs subtly and can take
many forms. Context is all-important. Well before March 2003,
intelligence analysts and their managers knew that the United States was
heading for war with Iraq. It was clear that the Bush administration
would frown on or ignore analysis that called into question a decision
to go to war and welcome analysis that supported such a decision.
Intelligence analysts - for whom attention, especially favorable
attention, from policymakers is a measure of success - felt a strong
wind consistently blowing in one direction. The desire to bend with such
a wind is natural and strong, even if unconscious.

   On the issue of Iraqi WMD, dozens of analysts throughout the
intelligence community were making many judgments on many different
issues based on fragmentary and ambiguous evidence. The differences
between sound intelligence analysis (bearing in mind the gaps in
information) and the flawed analysis that actually was produced had to
do mainly with matters of caveat, nuance, and word choice. The
opportunities for bias were numerous. It may not be possible to point to
one key instance of such bending or to measure the cumulative effect of
such pressure. But the effect was probably significant.

   A clearer form of politicization is the inconsistent review of
analysis: reports that conform to policy preferences have an easier time
making it through the gauntlet of coordination and approval than ones
that do not. (Every piece of intelligence analysis reflects not only the
judgments of the analysts most directly involved in writing it, but also
the concurrence of those who cover related topics and the review,
editing, and remanding of it by several levels of supervisors, from
branch chiefs to senior executives.) The Silberman-Robb commission noted
such inconsistencies in the Iraq case but chalked it up to bad
management. The commission failed to address exactly why managers were
inconsistent: they wanted to avoid the unpleasantness of laying
unwelcome analysis on a policymaker's desk.

   Another form of politicization with a similar cause is the
sugarcoating of what otherwise would be an unpalatable message. Even the
mostly prescient analysis about the problems likely to be encountered in
postwar Iraq included some observations that served as sugar, added in
the hope that policymakers would not throw the report directly into the
burn bag, but damaging the clarity of the analysis in the process.

   But the principal way that the intelligence community's work on Iraq
was politicized concerned the specific questions to which the community
devoted its energies. As any competent pollster can attest, how a
question is framed helps determine the answer. In the case of Iraq,
there was also the matter of sheer quantity of output - not just what
the intelligence community said, but how many times it said it. On any
given subject, the intelligence community faces what is in effect a
field of rocks, and it lacks the resources to turn over every one to see
what threats to national security may lurk underneath. In an
unpoliticized environment, intelligence officers decide which rocks to
turn over based on past patterns and their own judgments. But when
policymakers repeatedly urge the intelligence community to turn over
only certain rocks, the process becomes biased. The community responds
by concentrating its resources on those rocks, eventually producing a
body of reporting and analysis that, thanks to quantity and emphasis,
leaves the impression that what lies under those same rocks is a bigger
part of the problem than it really is.

   That is what happened when the Bush administration repeatedly called
on the intelligence community to uncover more material that would
contribute to the case for war. The Bush team approached the community
again and again and pushed it to look harder at the supposed Saddam-al
Qaeda relationship - calling on analysts not only to turn over
additional Iraqi rocks, but also to turn over ones already examined and
to scratch the dirt to see if there might be something there after all.
The result was an intelligence output that - because the question being
investigated was never put in context - obscured rather than enhanced
understanding of al Qaeda's actual sources of strength and support.

   This process represented a radical departure from the textbook model
of the relationship between intelligence and policy, in which an
intelligence service responds to policymaker interest in certain
subjects (such as "security threats from Iraq" or "al Qaeda's
supporters") and explores them in whatever direction the evidence leads.
The process did not involve intelligence work designed to find dangers
not yet discovered or to inform decisions not yet made. Instead, it
involved research to find evidence in support of a specific line of
argument - that Saddam was cooperating with al Qaeda - which in turn was
being used to justify a specific policy decision.

   One possible consequence of such politicization is policymaker
self-deception. A policymaker can easily forget that he is hearing so
much about a particular angle in briefings because he and his fellow
policymakers have urged the intelligence community to focus on it. A
more certain consequence is the skewed application of the intelligence
community's resources. Feeding the administration's voracious appetite
for material on the Saddam-al Qaeda link consumed an enormous amount of
time and attention at multiple levels, from rank-and-file
counterterrorism analysts to the most senior intelligence officials. It
is fair to ask how much other counterterrorism work was left undone as a
result.

   The issue became even more time-consuming as the conflict between
intelligence officials and policymakers escalated into a battle, with
the intelligence community struggling to maintain its objectivity even
as policymakers pressed the Saddam-al Qaeda connection. The
administration's rejection of the intelligence community's judgments
became especially clear with the formation of a special Pentagon unit,
the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group. The unit, which reported
to Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, was dedicated to finding
every possible link between Saddam and al Qaeda, and its briefings
accused the intelligence community of faulty analysis for failing to see
the supposed alliance.

   For the most part, the intelligence community's own substantive
judgments do not appear to have been compromised. (A possible important
exception was the construing of an ambiguous, and ultimately recanted,
statement from a detainee as indicating that Saddam's Iraq provided
jihadists with chemical or biological training.) But although the charge
of faulty analysis was never directly conveyed to the intelligence
community itself, enough of the charges leaked out to create a public
perception of rancor between the administration and the intelligence
community, which in turn encouraged some administration supporters to
charge intelligence officers (including me) with trying to sabotage the
president's policies. This poisonous atmosphere reinforced the
disinclination within the intelligence community to challenge the
consensus view about Iraqi WMD programs; any such challenge would have
served merely to reaffirm the presumptions of the accusers.

   *Partial Repairs*

   Although the Iraq war has provided a particularly stark illustration
of the problems in the intelligence-policy relationship, such problems
are not confined to this one issue or this specific administration. Four
decades ago, the misuse of intelligence about an ambiguous encounter in
the Gulf of Tonkin figured prominently in the Johnson administration's
justification for escalating the military effort in Vietnam. Over a
century ago, the possible misinterpretation of an explosion on a US
warship in Havana harbor helped set off the chain of events that led to
a war of choice against Spain. The Iraq case needs further examination
and reflection on its own. But public discussion of how to foster a
better relationship between intelligence officials and policymakers and
how to ensure better use of intelligence on future issues is also
necessary.

   Intelligence affects the nation's interests through its effect on
policy. No matter how much the process of intelligence gathering itself
is fixed, the changes will do no good if the role of intelligence in the
policymaking process is not also addressed. Unfortunately, there is no
single clear fix to the sort of problem that arose in the case of Iraq.
The current ill will may not be reparable, and the perception of the
intelligence community on the part of some policymakers - that Langley
is enemy territory - is unlikely to change. But a few steps, based on
the recognition that the intelligence-policy relationship is indeed
broken, could reduce the likelihood that such a breakdown will recur.

   On this point, the United States should emulate the United Kingdom,
where discussion of this issue has been more forthright, by declaring
once and for all that its intelligence services should not be part of
public advocacy of policies still under debate. In the United Kingdom,
Prime Minister Tony Blair accepted a commission of inquiry's conclusions
that intelligence and policy had been improperly commingled in such
exercises as the publication of the "dodgy dossier," the British
counterpart to the United States' Iraqi WMD white paper, and that in the
future there should be a clear delineation between intelligence and
policy. An American declaration should take the form of a congressional
resolution and be seconded by a statement from the White House. Although
it would not have legal force, such a statement would discourage future
administrations from attempting to pull the intelligence community into
policy advocacy. It would also give some leverage to intelligence
officers in resisting any such future attempts.

   A more effective way of identifying and exposing improprieties in
the relationship is also needed. The CIA has a "politicization
ombudsman," but his informally defined functions mostly involve serving
as a sympathetic ear for analysts disturbed by evidence of
politicization and then summarizing what he hears for senior agency
officials. The intelligence oversight committees in Congress have an
important role, but the heightened partisanship that has bedeviled so
much other work on Capitol Hill has had an especially inhibiting effect
in this area. A promised effort by the Senate Intelligence Committee to
examine the Bush administration's use of intelligence on Iraq got stuck
in the partisan mud. The House committee has not even attempted to
address the subject.

   The legislative branch is the appropriate place for monitoring the
intelligence-policy relationship. But the oversight should be conducted
by a nonpartisan office modeled on the Government Accountability Office
(GAO) and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Such an office would
have a staff, smaller than that of the GAO or the CBO, of officers
experienced in intelligence and with the necessary clearances and access
to examine questions about both the politicization of classified
intelligence work and the public use of intelligence. As with the GAO,
this office could conduct inquiries at the request of members of
Congress. It would make its results public as much as possible,
consistent with security requirements, and it would avoid duplicating
the many other functions of intelligence oversight, which would remain
the responsibility of the House and Senate intelligence committees.

   Beyond these steps, there is the more difficult issue of what place
the intelligence community should occupy within the executive branch.
The reorganization that created the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence (DNI) is barely a year old, and yet another reorganization
at this time would compound the disruption. But the flaws in the
narrowly conceived and hastily considered reorganization legislation of
December 2004 - such as ambiguities in the DNI's authority - will make
it necessary to reopen the issues it addressed. Any new legislation
should also tackle something the 2004 legislation did not: the problem
of having the leaders of the intelligence community, which is supposed
to produce objective and unvarnished analysis, serve at the pleasure of
the president.

   The organizational issue is also difficult because of a dilemma that
intelligence officers have long discussed and debated among themselves:
that although distance from policymakers may be needed for objectivity,
closeness is needed for influence. For most of the past quarter century,
intelligence officials have striven for greater closeness, in a
perpetual quest for policymakers' ears. The lesson of the Iraq episode,
however, is that the supposed dilemma has been incorrectly conceived.
Closeness in this case did not buy influence, even on momentous issues
of war and peace; it bought only the disadvantages of politicization.

   The intelligence community should be repositioned to reflect the
fact that influence and relevance flow not just from face time in the
Oval Office, but also from credibility with Congress and, most of all,
with the American public. The community needs to remain in the executive
branch but be given greater independence and a greater ability to
communicate with those other constituencies (fettered only by security
considerations, rather than by policy agendas). An appropriate model is
the Federal Reserve, which is structured as a quasi-autonomous body
overseen by a board of governors with long fixed terms.

   These measures would reduce both the politicization of the
intelligence community's own work and the public misuse of intelligence
by policymakers. It would not directly affect how much attention
policymakers give to intelligence, which they would continue to be
entitled to ignore. But the greater likelihood of being called to public
account for discrepancies between a case for a certain policy and an
intelligence judgment would have the indirect effect of forcing
policymakers to pay more attention to those judgments in the first place.

   These changes alone will not fix the intelligence-policy
relationship. But if Congress and the American people are serious about
"fixing intelligence," they should not just do what is easy and
politically convenient. At stake are the soundness of US foreign-policy
making and the right of Americans to know the basis for decisions taken
in the name of their security.

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