BOOM goes the dynamite: “A group of intelligence analysts have provided investigators with documents they say show that senior military officers manipulated the conclusions of reports on the war against the Islamic State, according to several government officials, as lawmakers from both parties voiced growing anger that they may have received a distorted picture about the military campaign’s progress.” Government inspectors specifically looking at CENTCOM (United States Central Command), which of course was the subject of a potentially devastating Daily Beast report from last week that alleged that precisely this was going on. Naturally, the New York Times doesn’t want to admit that the original problem arose largely because this administration hates being told things that it doesn’t like to hear, but at least the Times is taking the situation seriously, right?
The real question is whether the Democrats will, or whether they’re going to try to scapegoat. I’m guessing ‘scapegoat:’
“We do take seriously any allegations of the mishandling or manipulation of intelligence information for purposes other than getting to ground truth,” Representative Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Tuesday. “In the wake of the flawed intelligence prior to the Iraq war, we must make sure that all voices are appropriately considered and that assessments are never again politicized.”
And this is why you can’t take Adam Schiff – or any other Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee (or anywhere else) – seriously. ‘Flawed intelligence,’ in this case, is a Democratic code phrase for ‘You need to pretend to be upset over this particular mistake:’ contra the fever dreams of the antiwar movement at the time, the Bush administration was a good deal more cautious about defining the knowns, unknowns, and known unknowns than said movement credited said administration at the time. Besides, there’s a marked difference between providing analyses that are inherently pessimistic and ones that are inherently optimistic.
Mind you, too pessimistic can be a problem, as the career of General George McClellan can attest* – but it’s rarely wicked. The Obama administration apparently fostered behaviors from its military analysts that were very, very wicked indeed. We should do something about that… particularly on the Executive Branch side. A fish rots from the head down.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
*Fun historical trivia fact: McClellan later parlayed his amazing inability to win battles into a Presidential nomination in 1864. …As a Democrat, of course. It’s almost as if there’s a larger narrative, here.
Did McClellan ever actually fight any battles? (yeah, I know he did in the peninsula campaign) He spent most of his career as Commander of the Army of the Potomac convinced he was overwhelmingly outnumbered (when the reverse was closer to accurate) and too tentative to engage. There was nothing wrong with his organizational or tactical skills, he just didn’t have the heart to risk losing….
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Grant, otoh, wasn’t a particularly brilliant commander, but he pointed his divisions south and started pushing… relentlessly.
Antietam.
He LITERALLY was handed Lee’s plans and dispositions, and had a superior force concentrated and closer to the pieces of Lee’s divided forces than those pieces were to each other. If Grant or a LOT of other Union generals had been given that opportunity, the war could’ve been over that week. Little Mac being Little Mac, he got a tactical draw on the bloodiest single day of the war, and Lee withdrew successfully. It was just BARELY enough of a win for Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation–which was ITSELF one of the biggest steps to ultimate victory.
I disagree with your assessment of the politics of the fake-intelligence complaints.
The anti-war section of the Democratic base was opposed to the war with no regard to the intelligence. The problem was for Democrats (especially senators) who wanted a viable political future in the democratic party.
Hence, the fake-intelligence meme, as an excuse for why they voted for the Iraq war.
The only people who seem to have taken it seriously are juice-box media types.
Human beings are not rational, they are rationalizing.
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The juice-box-mafia needed a *rationalization* for not trying to primary more sitting Dems the way they primaried Joe Lieberman and Zell Miller. (that is, disasterously)
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Saying “bad intel” and insinuating “faked” let the juice-suckers give the Dems a pass .. which is a surprising display of cunning from them as a group.
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Mew