Paul Pillar

It is extraordinary that the makers of the Iraq War in the George W. Bush administration got so many people to go along with such an ill-conceived project of such a small number of zealous proponents (a “cabal,” in Lawrence Wilkerson's phrase). Being able to exploit the national anguish and anger over 9/11 was a critical ingredient, of course. But the success of the war-selling campaign was testimony to what a determined use of the opinion-molding capabilities of the government of the day, including the bully pulpit of the presidency, can accomplish. The dragging of even many Democrats and liberals into going along with the project was less a matter of instilling any specific mistaken belief than of instilling a mood and momentum. It was a matter of sending a war train hurtling down the track and daring anyone to get in the way.

The manufactured issue of an “alliance” between Saddam Hussein’s regime and al-Qaeda demonstrated the manipulative potential involved. Unlike the sales campaign's companion issue of weapons of mass destruction, there was no logical or historical basis for believing that such an alliance existed. The postulation of such an alliance also contradicted judgments of the U.S. intelligence community and other experts inside and outside government. Getting many members of the public to believe that such an alliance nonetheless existed was partly a matter of touting phony evidence such as a nonexistent meeting in Prague and of making highly tendentious interpretations of other reporting. But promoting this belief was at least as much a matter of rhetorical themes as of manipulated evidence. The belief was cultivated by repeatedly uttering “Iraq,” “9/11” and “war on terror” in the same breath. The cultivation was so successful that by the peak of the war-promoters’ sales campaign in late 2002 a majority of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein not only was allied with al-Qaeda but also had been directly involved in the 9/11 attack.

Now there is evidence of how long-lasting such assiduously promoted falsehoods can be. Majorities may no longer believe in such untruths, but large minorities still do. In a new poll directed by Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland, 38 percent of Americans polled said that the United States had “found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the al-Qaeda terrorist organization.” In a somewhat differently formulated question, 15 percent said that “Iraq was directly involved in carrying out the September 11th attacks” and another 31 percent—for a total of 46 percent—believed that Iraq was not involved in 9/11 but had given “substantial support” to al-Qaeda. Perhaps in an age when major presidential candidates doubt that natural life on earth has evolved or that human activities affect the climate, we should not be surprised at such officially instigated ignorance. But with nearly a decade having passed, with all that has been brought to light about the war-makers' sales campaign, and with all the costs and agonies of the Iraq War itself (and even allowing for some dissonance-reduction along those who supported the war and want to believe they did so for a good reason), these poll results are still remarkable.

A couple of implications follow about the present. One is that when an administration sets out to manipulate truth and falsehood as shamelessly as the promoters of the Iraq War did, the damage is not limited only to adoption of whatever policies the manipulators are promoting. The substantial lingering misconceptions among the public make for broader damage. The persistent mistaken beliefs among more than a third of Americans about Iraq and al-Qaeda greatly inhibit public understanding about terrorism, about the Middle East, and about how their own government has operated.

The second implication is that the government of the day, if applying enough single-minded determination, has tremendous power to sway the populace and generate support for new initiatives. This power could be used for good and not only for ill. Just imagine, for example, if the kind of concerted sales campaign that made it possible to do something as extraordinary as launching a major offensive war were to be applied to an all-out U.S. effort to resolve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Such an effort still would run up against resistance from a strong lobby, but unlike with the Iraq War, selling the effort would not require manufacturing any issues or manipulating any falsehoods. Lack of resolution of the conflict really does hurt U.S. interests, and one could explain that while sticking totally to the truth.

Image by Deutsche Fotothek

My friend Mike O'Hanlon has provided in these spaces an accurate summary of recent security and political trends in Iraq. O'Hanlon has long been one of the best sources of good data on Iraq, presented in a form making it easy for the public to chew on. The first point O'Hanlon makes is that Iraq remains much less violent than a few years ago, notwithstanding some recent bloody attacks that have gotten what he regards as undue emphasis partly because of “sloppy journalists.” He seems to be anxious to counter any argument to the effect that if security in Iraq is going downhill than the military intervention there is a failure and ought to end. The implications of any trend in violence, up or down, for the advisability of continuing the U.S. military mission there, however, have never been self-evident. If the security situation is good, does that mean what we are doing must be working and we should continue, or does it mean the mission has been accomplished and we should leave? If the security situation is bad, does that mean we have more work to do in Iraq and should stay, or does it mean the mission is a failure and the sooner it ends the better? One can find versions of each of these arguments, which says more about the predispositions of people advancing the arguments than about implications of a security trend considered by itself. So one needs to look at other trends as well.

That gets to O'Hanlon's second point, which is that Iraq's politics, unlike the security situation, are going “backwards,” with plenty of discord and an inability of the sectarian and confessional communities to reach agreements. Accurate again. Sunnis greatly distrust Shiites, Kurdish ambitions are incompatible with Arab ones and so on. O'Hanlon rightly observes that Iraq's civil war “cannot yet be considered definitively over.”

So the externally assisted imposition of increased security doesn't correlate positively at all with movement toward resolution of Iraq's internal conflicts and toward a more stable political order. Insofar as the political situation is moving backward, the correlation is negative. It is most glaringly negative with regard to aspects of the current conflict that are not just a delayed playing out of contests that the Baathist dictatorship had forcibly suspended but are direct consequences of the U.S.-initiated war. This is especially true of one of the indicators of instability that O'Hanlon mentions: a significant presence in Iraq of al-Qaeda, which wasn't there at all before 2003.

Put these observations about current trends in Iraq together and the conclusion should be clear: because the U.S.-assisted security effort is not bringing Iraq any closer to political reconciliation and stability, the end-of-year deadline for extracting U.S. troops from Iraq should be observed, save perhaps for the approximately 3,000 personnel that the Obama administration envisions keeping there in a mostly training role. And yet, O'Hanlon's concluding point is much different: "Three thousand U.S. troops in Iraq is too few.”

How can a conclusion so contrary to the implications of the premises be offered? Partly it is the light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel syndrome. O'Hanlon talks about “buying time” for Iraq—time for “wounds to heal,” “trust to be built” and so forth. But the required time would be, in terms of what is politically meaningful for Americans, essentially infinite. The wounds to be healed and the distrust to be overcome go back centuries in the case of Sunni-Shia relations.

We are also witnessing another example of the tendency to view most peoples as harmonious by nature if immediate points of friction could be overcome, fears could be assuaged and appropriate legal formulas could be devised. Contain immediate threats to safety and security, the thinking goes, and people will find ways to resolve their differences. This was the premise underlying the surge in Iraq, and subsequent experience clearly showed the premise to be invalid. Similarly invalid thinking has been involved in peacekeeping missions in some other countries. The flaw in the thinking is that sometimes a conflict of interests is so substantial that no amount of reassurance or friction-reducing measures will resolve it. Sometimes the only thing that would resolve it is a test of strength in a civil war—a war that is allowed to be fought to a finish and not interrupted by outsiders, which only delays the inevitable. Edward Luttwak made similar observations more than a decade ago, arguing that sometimes the best thing for outsiders to do is to “give war a chance.”

Iraqis gotta do what they gotta do, even if that means waging more civil war. It ultimately does them no good, and it certainly does the United States no good, to keep intervening in their affairs with the vain hope of avoiding the unavoidable.

Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform Amid the crescendo of stock-taking retrospective assessments marking the ten-year anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attack, I suggested earlier this week that the most important retrospective reflection is to consider why the world’s superpower should have become so preoccupied with this one incident that ten years later there are still so many retrospective reflections about it. But I'm going to indulge in offering one more retrospective assessment. Consider it a corrective to much of the national self-assurance we have been hearing about how measures taken since 9/11 have made us all safer. In fact, some of those measures have not made us safer but instead have served the psychologically satisfying function of letting us pretend that we are fixing a problem. I focus on one particular measure—reorganization of the intelligence community—because I happen to be especially familiar with it and because it was one of the most prominent of the supposed fixes.

Americans, being denizens of a historically successful country, tend to think that with enough ingenuity and determination any problem they face can be fixed. The trauma of 9/11 elicited this attitude in spades. If something horrible like that happened, went the thinking, it must have been because some part of the government was broken; fix that problem and there would not be a recurrence of the horrible happening. Attention was especially focused on intelligence for several reasons: that it has traditionally been a focus of attention in this way, the unpopularity of the agencies concerned, an unrealistic view of what is knowable, and a belief that if the public were surprised by something than that part of the government must have been surprised as well.

The body known as the 9/11 Commission became the vehicle for fulfilling the public's yearnings in this regard and for achieving a kind of national catharsis after the tragedy of 9/11. The commission performed that role masterfully, hitting all the expected notes about making Americans safe by fixing a broken intelligence community. It did not matter that the intelligence community had actually provided strong strategic warning about the threat that would materialize on 9/11. The commission staff dealt with that inconvenient fact by producing a highly politicized report that conveyed a different impression, mostly by simply not mentioning a large portion of the relevant and accurate work that the intelligence community had done. It also did not matter that there was a lack of good new ideas about how to do such work better. The favorite Washington response when lacking better ideas for fixing something is to reorganize. So reorganization it was. The commission dusted off an old idea to separate the position of Director of Central Intelligence into two jobs. It added another proposal, also based on pre-9/11 ideas, for an additional counterterrorist center alongside the existing centers devoted to the topic. The net result of this rearrangement of the intelligence community's wiring diagram was more, and more complicated, bureaucracy. In a move pitched as addressing a problem of coordinating work of several agencies, it added a couple of new agencies whose work needs to be coordinated. In touting what supposedly was a fix to a problem of information flowing across bureaucratic lines, it added still more bureaucratic lines across which information must flow.

The commission did such a skillful job of providing the catharsis the public wanted, and its output was accepted so uncritically and automatically, that the description I just presented is jarringly at odds with the prevailing public perception of what both the commission and the intelligence community had done. I don't expect anyone to accept this description on the basis of these brief remarks here. A full appreciation of what took place requires a more detailed look at this subject, including a detailed examination of the commission's handling of the subject—an examination that has been almost entirely missing in the unquestioning acceptance of what the commission said and did. I invite the reader to consult my own attempt at such an examination in the relevant portions of a just-released book and to reach his or her own judgments on the matter.

The defects of a reorganization scheme that serves more as catharsis than as a better way to combat terrorism have been all too apparent in the six years that the scheme has been in effect. And yet the uncritical acceptance of what the commission said and did has meant a refusal—most conspicuously, of course, by people associated with the commission itself—to recognize those defects. Instead, the problems get blamed on something else. A  recently issued “Report Card” by the National Security Preparedness Group, which is co-chaired by the 9/11 Commission's leaders and describes itself as a “follow-on” to the commission, expresses two laments about how the position of Director of National Intelligence, one of the new jobs the created, has turned out. First, the DNI has failed to be “the driving force for intelligence community integration that we had envisioned.” The report card talks about a possible need for giving the DNI more authority over budgets and personnel. But the inherent limitation in all this—the fundamental flaw in looking to such an official to be this kind of “driving force”—is that the intelligence community is a community, not a unitary organization, for good reason, and always will be. Most of the components of the community are in other departments because they serve those departments' intelligence needs, and the secretaries of those departments will rightly insist that it stay that way. The second lament is to note the rapid turnover in the DNI job, with four directors in six years. The report card doesn't mention the main reason for this: the severe and unavoidable frustrations and frictions stemming from the reorganization scheme itself, with unclear lines of responsibility and a disconnect between power and responsibility.

Ten years ought to be enough time for Americans to get over their overwhelming post-9/11 need for catharsis and reassurance and to look more critically at what was done for that purpose, including measures that pretend to be fixing something but really aren't.

Representative democracies—successful, stable ones—are fragile things. They require a set of attitudes and habits, which are not found in sufficient degree in most of the world's polities, that combine the concepts of majority rule and loyal opposition with an acceptance of the need to compromise. These attitudes and habits are even more important to successful representative democracies than are formal institutions, as suggested by the written constitutions of many authoritarian states that on paper look just as democratic as those in Western countries that are widely regarded as successful democracies. It is also suggested by the example of Britain, which makes do with no written constitution at all and whose government is, if stripped of those essential attitudes and habits, nothing more than a party dictatorship.

The political culture underlying successful democracies takes a very long time to develop. And although a long-established democratic culture has inertia, it can be seriously damaged in less time than it took to develop. A stable democratic system depends on trust and on the belief that others are observing the same restraints and the same unwritten rules as oneself. Any reason to discard that belief is thus a threat to the entire system. The dynamic is similar to patterns of urban crime, in which even small indications, such as graffiti, of an erosion of law and order encourage larger damage.

This is part of why the extremist methods taken up by Republicans in Congress, as practiced particularly by House Republican leader Eric Cantor, are dangerous. Significant economic damage has already been inflicted by the Republicans' recent taking as a hostage the nation's credit worthiness. Ben Bernanke was using restrained central-banker's language but could not ignore what had happened when he said last week that the debt-ceiling caper “disrupted financial markets and probably the economy as well.” Over the long term, the political damage to the working of American democracy may be even greater than the economic damage.

The act of extortion involving the debt ceiling was not a one-off. Now Cantor has taken victims of Hurricane Irene hostage by insisting they should get no aid unless there are offsetting cuts in the domestic programs that he and his colleagues on his side of the aisle don't happen to like. Republicans in the Senate are getting in on the act as well, particularly through manipulation of the confirmation function. They are refusing to confirm even well-qualified nominees to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as a way of trying to negate the legislation creating the bureau, which they also don't happen to like. As Representative Barney Frank, ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee and a coauthor of that legislation, correctly described what is happening, the Republicans are “blatantly distorting the Constitution, substituting a refusal to allow the constitutionally mandated nomination process for the legislative process in which they simply do not have the votes to accomplish what they want.”

Paul Krugman's column in Friday's New York Times cuts to the heart of this attack on America's democratic culture. He points out how fraudulent is Cantor's posturing in the name of deficit reduction, especially given how Cantor and his colleagues had no problem with the huge unfunded expenditures of the Bush administration, most notably the Iraq War (which has cost about $800 billion directly, with the meter still running and not counting the ultimately greater indirect costs). As Krugman comments, however, this hypocrisy isn't even the biggest problem. Here's the biggest problem:

Not long ago, a political party seeking to change U.S. policy would try to achieve that goal by building popular support for its ideas, then implementing those ideas through legislation. That, after all, is how our political system was designed to work. But today’s G.O.P. has decided to bypass all that and go for a quicker route. Never mind getting enough votes to pass legislation; it gets what it wants by threatening to hurt America if its demands aren’t met.

This is the way any number of unstable, undemocratic Third World countries work, in which political outcomes are determined by whoever is best able to inflict or threaten to inflict harm on his countrymen if he does not get his way. We may still be a long way from having Somalia-on-the-Potomac, but the extremists in Congress have taken a step in that direction. The appropriate response by anyone who cares deeply about American democracy is to call the extremists to account, loudly and often, for how their methods are undemocratic and un-American.