WASHINGTON, Feb. 18 (UPI) -- In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, long-time CIA official Paul R. Pillar described how the Bush administration ignored the American intelligence community's judgments regarding Iraq. Pillar, who was National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005 and is now a visiting professor at Georgetown University, also pointed out that this is not the first time something like this has happened, and that the intelligence process as it now exists is all too prone to politicization by policymakers. But as Pillar warns, fixing this problem will not be easy.
In his article, Pillar states that the Bush administration ignored the intelligence community's judgment that Iraq was several years away from developing nuclear weapons and that there was no alliance between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida. Just as importantly, the White House ignored intelligence community warnings of how difficult it would be to pacify Iraq and the likelihood of guerrilla warfare emerging unless the U.S. "established security and put Iraq on the road to prosperity in the first few weeks or months after the fall of Saddam."
If Bush administration policymakers had absorbed all three of these intelligence community judgments, it may have seen that, as awful as Saddam Hussein's regime was, it did not pose an immediate threat to the U.S. either with weapons of mass destruction or in conjunction with al-Qaida. In addition, the immense resources that America has devoted to Iraq for almost three years now could have been devoted instead to hunting down the al-Qaida leadership and keeping the Taliban out of Afghanistan.
It is impossible to know, of course, whether not intervening in Iraq would have allowed the U.S. to capture bin Laden or pacify and democratize Afghanistan. The real question is whether anything can be done to reduce the politicization of intelligence which has led the U.S. into an unpopular war which, if anything, has strengthened bin Laden's supporters.
Pillar himself notes that depoliticizing intelligence will not be easy. The desire of intelligence analysts to be close to policymakers -- who are free to ignore analysis and analysts they disagree with -- has an inherently politicizing effect on the intelligence process. Pillar suggests that the intelligence community needs to be repositioned so that its "influence and relevance" do not derive solely from the White House, but also from credibility with Congress and the American public. Accomplishing this, he acknowledges, will be difficult. Congressional oversight, for example, probably cannot be expected to ensure that intelligence is not politicized when Congress itself is so highly so.
Pillar suggests that the intelligence community be organized like the Federal Reserve, which is "structured as a quasi-autonomous body overseen by a board of governors with long fixed terms." Pillar did not elaborate any further on how this would work, but this is an idea that needs to be explored.
Statements made by the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve have an enormous impact. What makes the Federal Reserve Chairman so influential, though, is that the Federal Reserve has real power, independent of the White House and the rest of the federal government, to affect interest rates. It is difficult to imagine a Chairman of the Board of Governors of the National Intelligence Community enjoying a similar independent power, and hence being able to be as influential.
Despite this, an intelligence community board of governors -- chaired by a highly respected former Secretary of State, National Security Council Adviser, or CIA Director -- could play an extremely useful role if it were empowered to determine and declare publicly whether the administration is politicizing intelligence. Such a finding would have had an enormous impact in 2002-03 before the American-led intervention in Iraq, and may have prevented it altogether.
Another useful task this body could perform would be to issue an independent annual report detailing all the international problems affecting American interests and assessing whether the intelligence community as a whole is devoting enough attention to analyzing them. A model for this might be the State Department's annual "Country Reports on Human Rights Practices." This report gives a candid assessment of every government's human rights record -- including those of authoritarian regimes closely allied to the U.S. An annual "assessment of intelligence assessments" could be prepared in classified form for internal use by the U.S. Government and in unclassified form for the public.
It is, of course, highly doubtful that either the Bush administration or any other would be willing to allow the creation of a Board of Governors of the National Intelligence Community with even this much independent power. Perhaps the only real way to reduce the politicization of intelligence, then, is for the appointment of policymakers who genuinely respect the work of the intelligence community and who will not dismiss analysis that contradicts their policy preferences.
This will not happen, however, unless and until the President himself respects the work of the intelligence community and insists that his appointees do likewise.
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(Mark N. Katz is a professor of government and politics at George Mason University.)
