Porter Goss got fired from his CIA job after only 19 months on the job. Bush's leakers are doing a real number on him, and his reputation.
But it's all really just a smokescreen.
A smokescreen to cover up all four failures leading up to the mess in Iraq. A smokescreen carefully designed to shift blame away from the administration's "four horsemen of failure" -- Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice.
The truth of the matter is that even if our intel effort had been perfect, we still would have finished last in Iraq.
You see, the Iraq invasion was like a race horse running on four legs of intellectual input: (1) knowledge, (2) wisdom, (3) imagination and (4) intelligence.
All four legs broke. Not just intelligence.
Let's take them one at a time.
We knew nothing about what we were getting into. Yet a trip to the library would have provided Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice with 20/20 foresight. They would have found several books describing what happened when the British tried to govern Iraq between the two World Wars. British army control created a powerful insurgency that cost its occupiers a great deal ... measured in lives, treasury and political frustration.
Other books would describe the "historical memories" of the Iraqis, which cause continual distrust and hatred for the West dating back to the Crusades and continuing through the eras of British/French colonization in the Middle East. Such experiences led Iraqis to believe that "democracy is just a trick of the West." In that kind of environment, it is very difficult to believe that Iraq would be ready to discard Muslim law and happily embrace a Western-style democracy.
There are also books which describe U.S. efforts to subdue the Philippines immediately after the Spanish-American War of 1898. The U.S. Army crushed the Philippine Army quite easily. Unfortunately, the Philippine army disappeared into the culture and emerged as a fierce insurgency. While we lost fewer than 400 men during the war, the following insurgency cost over 4,000 lives. Sound familiar?
The Japanese, too, created a powerful insurgency in the Philippines during World War II. Ever scientific, the Japanese Army concluded that each Filipino guerrilla required 25 Japanese soldiers. Projecting that ratio to Iraq would have suggested the need for over 500,000 troops in Iraq to achieve order and quell the likely insurgency. The only man who seemed to understand the arithmetic, General Eric Shinseki, was fired by the highly unread Defense Secretary Rumsfeld.
The biggest failure in Iraq was an incredible knowledge failure that had nothing to do with the CIA or its responsibilities. Knowledge failure has to be laid at the feet of the war's chief protagonists and their departments and aides. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice may be very intelligent, but it is clear that they constituted "the axis of the unread."
By ignoring history, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice violated Santayana's famed warning, "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." By shunning history, they repeated the tendency of a hated invader to create a violent, low-tech insurgency. Only a man devoid of wisdom could have proclaimed, "The Iraqis will welcome us with open arms." (If a bunch of Iraqi soldiers invaded your neighborhood, would you welcome them with open arms?) But Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice are highly intelligent people, you argue. How could they have been so lacking in common sense? A great Indian philosopher once said, "Where there is great light, there is great shadow." High cognitive intelligence was the Bush administration's shining light. A very low "wisdom quotient" was its deep, dark shadow.
The wisdom of war could have been absorbed by reading a 100-page translation of Sun Tzu's Art of War. Although the book is regarded throughout the world as the finest book on warfare, the administration violated every principle in it. Especially about how to treat a conquered army. According to Sun Tzu, you don't disband it. You incorporate it into your forces and use it, saving enormously in lives and treasury. Instead Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice have chosen to spend lavishly in American lives and treasure.
Using Condoleezza Rice's "9/11" language, "it was unimaginable" for our four horsemen to believe that a low-tech insurgency could compete with America's super, high-tech might. But was it unimaginable? Again, go to the Philippines with America's well-equipped army sporting its long, elegant Springfield rifles. What was the chief weapon of the insurgency? Machetes. The insurgents would pop out of the jungle, ambushing surprised American patrols whose high-tech rifles were useless in hand-to-hand combat on the narrow jungle trails. It wasn't until the troops were equipped with the .45 automatic handgun that the tide turned. The weapon could not shoot accurately beyond 15 feet, but it was lethal in close quarter combat. Especially against machetes.
Imagination would have allowed our four horsemen to see the conceptual relationship between a civilian-clad insurgency camouflaged by the jungle and a civilian-clad insurgency camouflaged by a culture. She would have been able to project the Philippine machete, the Soviet Molotov cocktail and the Vietnamese pungi stick to the Iraqis' low-tech roadside bombs. Our horsemen should have been able to imagine roadside bombs, because every insurgency improvises weapons from the stuff at hand (sugar cane machetes for the Filipinos, empty vodka bottles and gasoline for the Soviets, and bamboo jungles for the Viet Cong). Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice had to have been aware of all the explosives cached around Iraq. The CIA certainly was.
Yes, the CIA failed in its analysis of weapons of mass destruction. But the CIA wasn't the only institution dealing with intelligence. About 80 percent of the intelligence budget is controlled by the Pentagon. Why blame the CIA when Secretary Rumsfeld has four times as many resources? And how about the State Department? It has its own intelligence operations. Then there's the National Security Agency. What did it come up with?
The truth is that there is a lot of intelligence failure to go around.
But that looks puny compared to the other failures in knowledge, wisdom and imagination shown by our four horsemen of failure -- Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice.
Our four horsemen, no longer cantering on the horse of victory, and hating the staggering horse of failure, have decided to ride the small but courageous shoulders of Porter Goss.
The voter doesn't seem to be buying it.
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