So, What Good is Intelligence, Anyway?

Aquinas could answer that, I'm sure. But I digress.

Military historian Sir John Keegan writes at The Telegraph today:

The [Blair] Government is facing demands for yet another investigation of the part played by the intelligence services in leading Britain to join the United States in the Iraq war. Two questions should be asked about such demands. The first is about the usefulness of intelligence in general to the inception and conduct of military operations. The second, more difficult to answer, is what specifically such an investigation might reveal.

The usefulness of military intelligence has a very mixed history. I say that with confidence, having recently published a long study, Intelligence In War, which set out to answer the question: how useful is intelligence? It consists of a number of case studies of intelligence operations from more than 100 years of military history chosen because evidence was available and clear-cut....

Above all, it must be remembered that British intelligence was attempting to penetrate the mentality of a man and a regime which were not wholly rational. It now seems probable that most of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed in the early 1990s, either by the first UN inspection team (UNSCOM) or as a precautionary measure on Saddam's own orders. Saddam was, however, unwilling to admit to such a loss of power, because of the prestige his possession of WMD brought him in the region. His policy of disposing of his WMD while refusing to admit the disposal was completely illogical.

But then almost nothing in Saddam's megalomaniac world was logical. What logical ruler would deliberately provoke two disastrous wars, either of which might have been avoided by the practice of a little prudence?

Finally, what purpose would be served by a further assessment of the dossier? Any inquiry would shortly resolve into a semantic argument about the nature of text editing: a sentence here, a phrase there.

It is supremely ironic that the BBC is demanding such a semantic argument, when the trouble it has got itself into was caused precisely by its failure to undertake any sort of editing at all of an unscripted text by a reporter with a less than perfect reputation for reliability.

See my Where Are Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction?

.... It does strike me, though, as odd that we are all trying to make sense of a situation in which the principal player for a decade or more was a madman....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 02/03/04 09:38:54 PM
Categorized as International.