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Intelligence and Post-War Iraqi Politics

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Intelligence and Post-War Iraqi Politics-1

August 31, 2003

The political situation in Iraq at present is extremely murky as well as chaotic. It is my conviction that the war was motivated chiefly to absolve Western governments of the dilemma posed by sanctions; these could not have been concluded without losing face unless Saddam were removed from power. But another important reason for the invasion was the expropriation of the oil rents. The costs of the war will be born by ordinary Americans, through large future tax increases.^1.1 The rents will go to friends of the administration.

Digby has posted in great detail about the liaison between American intelligence and Iraqi exiles during the years of hostility toward Ba'thist Iraq (1990-2003).

I had been under the impression that Ahmad Chalabi was washed up. I had imagined that the White House, which seems to be governed by a "cult of optimism," had assumed Chalabi would sweep all before him and was stunned when he remained a nonentity in the post-Saddam Iraq.^1.2 Chalabi's political fate in Iraq appears to be even more ignominious than Hamid Karzai's; while Karzai is only a singularly impotent warlord among many in Afghanistan, Chalabi has no political standing of any kind in Iraq and presumably never will have any.

All the same, I was in error to assume that Chalabi has nothing left to do but return to exile in London. Digby has done a fantastic job of culling reports of his relations with US intelligence and his Iraqi National Congress (INC) attempting to seize power.

The Iraqi National Congress, which is led by Ahmad Chalabi, the longtime exile who is now a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, says its senior officials have met with senior members of the so-called Iran and Turkey branch of the Mukhabarat, or Iraqi intelligence, over the past several weeks. The party has received documents from the intelligence officers and recruited them into a reconstituted version of the unit, said Abdulaziz Kubaisi, the Iraqi National Congress official responsible for the recruiting effort.
American officials, he said, are fully informed about what the party is doing. Iraqi intelligence officers who have been asked to rejoin the branch contend that the United States is orchestrating the effort.

In other words, a group posing as a political "party"—not the Iraqi Governing Council—has launched efforts to take over an reconstitute Saddam's secret police, the Mukhabarrat. This is Leninism.

Chalabi was appointed to the IGC by the Occupation Forces in Iraq. He attempted to launch a coup d'etat against Saddam's regime in 1995, a fiasco which led to at least 80 executions of secret enemies of Saddam in the army. His party—one of many—has seized control of many Ba'thist assets (aside from the conventional looting, of course). It would appear that a fairly sophisticated—if unoriginal—plan has been concocted to bring"order" to Iraq by imposing a falangist regime. Iraq, it appears, was not to be like post-WW2 Germany, or France, or Japan—it is to be like post-WW2 Romania. But at least the White House has begun to take Murphy's Law to heart.

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NOTES: 1.1 Economic "rents" are income coming from the uniqueness of a thing, such as a well-situated plot of land or managerial skills which cause a competitive firm to make profits even when the economy is in equilibrium. The price of oil, in a competitive market, is determined by the costs of the most expensive supplier in the market. If prices fall below that, then production is withdrawn until prices rise and the marginal producer's costs fall. Oil rents are the unusually high revenues made from recovering oil cheaply. Oil recovered in, say, Japan or Alaska is very expensive, while oil recovered in Iraq is cheap. But the market price is the same for all suppliers, so oil rents for Iraqi oil are immense.

Controlling the oil of Iraq would be unlikely to be of any use to the US since the price would still be determined by the most expensive supplier—which has never been Iraq. But any government ruling Iraq would be obligated to dispose of the rents in a way favorable to the GWB White House.

With respect to future tax increases—usually analysts look at the breathtaking future projected deficits and argue that either taxes will have to be increased drastically or social services will have to be whacked. I would venture to say that if social programs are reduced in a fiscal crisis, the problem they were meant to contain becomes much more severe. When the fiscal crisis is over, the social problems are far more expensive to manage, even if we accept a higher baseline level of crime, or illiteracy, or poverty, or unemployment, than we did in the past. This is why the Reagan cuts to social programs in the 1980's actually increased the costs of entitlements: social dislocation had become so much worse that a minimum level of social welfare was far costlier to deliver than a high level had been under, say, President Ford.

1.2 A "cult of optimism" is a pathology of organizations in which skepticism about success is regarded as disloyal. Think of it this way: all machines should be designed under the assumption of Murphy's Law. An airplane designed by an "optimist" is not one I would consent to let my beloved fly in. This administration is famous for ignoring the possibility that its plans could go wrong. Ahmad Chalabi told them what they wanted to hear, so they decided he was an Iraqi De Gaulle.

Iran Next?

January 21, 2005

Seymour Hersh, "The Coming Wars" (New Yorker)

Now that we are in the second term of Pres. Bush, the open question to so many of us is: are we headed for a war with Iran? Your humble correspondent would argue that fiscally and strategically, the USA is not up to such a thing. There is a shortage of manpower and materiel required for operations in Iraq, so troop commitments to that country will probably increase. Iran has four times the population of Iraq, and its armed forces have not been decimated by 13 years of sanctions; on the contrary, Iran has replaced the amateur zealots of the Iran-Iraq War with professional, formally trained officers. Unlike Iraq, whose terrain is mostly flat and exposed, Iran has three very large mountain ranges, and large regions where guerrilla forces can move in stealth. And while it is not remotely as authoritarian as Saddam's Iraq was, it is much more politically cohesive. Also, unlike Iraq, Iran has a substantial share of its economy not directly related to oil, including heavy industry.

When I became aware of the fact that the White House was talking in earnest about moving against Iran [with an "n"] I was nervous, but inclined to dismiss this as posturing—and misguided posturing at that. With the invasion of utterly exhausted, crippled Iraq tying up the US military, one could be excused for laughing off talk of attacking Iran. The inaugural address seemed to my ears to be motivated more as an apologia for a blunder (and a prelude to further assaults on actual freedom in the USA) rather than a charge to keep invading other countries.

Seymour Hersh's article in the New Yorker has put a severe dent in this belief.

Some readers may be inclined to accuse me of linking to this article out of a partisan sympathy for Mr. Hersh; of course I am endorsing another alarmist article by a muckraking gonzo journalist with anonymous sources: we both believe the President has been a disaster for this country and everyone else on earth. What is the use of posting yet another article promoting my preconceived notions? None, of course; Hersh, however, has thumped my preconceived notions. In the course of posting here I've tried to focus on dynamics and institutional failures that lead to the calamitous Bush administration. My object is not to berate it, but to understand how it works and how to anticipate it. So I am intellectually stimulated and challenged by an analysis so different from my own.

First, why would the White House attack Iran?

One Western diplomat told me that the Europeans believed they were in what he called a “lose-lose position” as long as the United States refuses to get involved. “France, Germany, and the U.K. cannot succeed alone, and everybody knows it,” the diplomat said. “If the U.S. stays outside, we don’t have enough leverage, and our effort will collapse.” The alternative would be to go to the Security Council, but any resolution imposing sanctions would likely be vetoed by China or Russia, and then “the United Nations will be blamed and the Americans will say, ‘The only solution is to bomb.’”

As with most alarm about Iran, a lot of circular reasoning is in play.

My preconceived notion is, as I mentioned, that the White House wants to launch another war, enabling another push to pass the PATRIOT II ACT. Such an achievement—coupled with two or three new Supreme Court appointees—would essentially make the GOP unassailable. However, such a course of action would be impossible, even as a potential fiasco. Even with highranking officers supporting the President ardently (just suppose) it is still inconceivable that anyone could draw up a plan to muster >150,000 personnel to invade Iran; and of course, Iran requires far more than that. Private military companies (PMCs) can pick up some of the slack, as can airpower; but remember that fantastic dosages of both were applied to the Iraq operation. And while the most committed fanatics in the administration might suppose that demonstrating students might oust the mullahs as American forces pour across the border, it's difficult to conceive of any planners wanting to police a country of that size and no functioning government, some of the longest land borders in the region, and so on, with a far smaller ratio of invading soldiers to population than held for Iraq.

Another preconceived notion of mine is that the White House is suffering from an extreme case of institutional dissolution. If one side of its brain demands brandy, and the other wants sleeping pills, it consumes both; and to offset the other, it takes more of each. Rather than avoid extremes by moderating and managing the cravings of the different factions of the far right, it instead placates all of them. This is not a sign of strength; it's a sign of weakness, since the White House can't contain the clamor of its supporters. Such organizations cannot be predicted; they cannot really make plausible plans about the future, since they can't postpone gratification. They could attempt to invade Iran, therefore, if and only if the hawks got into a game of "chicken" with each other. This would be roughly analogous to the plan of Gen. Jack D Ripper in Dr. Strangelove (synopsis), of launching a pre-emptive strike in order to force the rest of the government to back it up.

So much for my notions. Mr. Hersh declares that, on the contrary, the White House has achieved a stunning triumph of consolidation over the intelligence establishment. Members of the Directorate of Intelligence who doubted the neo-conservative mission have resigned en bloc:

A former C.I.A. clandestine-services officer told me that, in the months after the resignation of the agency’s director George Tenet, in June, 2004, the White House began “coming down critically” on analysts in the C.I.A.’s Directorate of Intelligence (D.I.) and demanded “to see more support for the Administration’s political position.” Porter Goss, Tenet’s successor, engaged in what the recently retired C.I.A. official described as a “political purge” in the D.I. Among the targets were a few senior analysts who were known to write dissenting papers that had been forwarded to the White House.
[...]
The White House solidified its control over intelligence last month, when it forced last-minute changes in the intelligence-reform bill. The legislation, based substantially on recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, originally gave broad powers, including authority over intelligence spending, to a new national-intelligence director.

This is not such a surprise: the modern GOP takes its strengths from business enterprise, where the sovereign virtue is single-minded, unflinching, and remorseless drive. Such people aren't concerned about what happens if they get everything they demand—that's their competitors' problem, not theirs. At the same time, they are talented at purging and reorganizing. Imagine a Gen. Ripper who is young, wet behind the ears, and an apostle of "Chainsaw Al" Dunlop. What challenges my preconceived notion is precisely this:

Rumsfeld will become even more important during the second term. In interviews with past and present intelligence and military officials, I was told that the agenda had been determined before the Presidential election, and much of it would be Rumsfeld’s responsibility. The war on terrorism would be expanded, and effectively placed under the Pentagon’s control. The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia.

In other words, according to Mr. Hersh, the White House has already committed to an updated plan of attack. Rather than repeat the invasion of Iraq, which might be an excessively tough sell (for one thing, in Iran I can understand how existing nuclear warheads really could disappear for many years; in Iraq, such a disappearance could only mean they had been destroyed before the war). A second invasion in pursuit of impossible-to-find WMD could make the Administration lose its majority of voters. Besides, it really is impossible. What would take its place?

In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran. “Everyone is saying, ‘You can’t be serious about targeting Iran. Look at Iraq,’” the former intelligence official told me. “But they say, ‘We’ve got some lessons learned—not militarily, but how we did it politically. We’re not going to rely on agency pissants.’ No loose ends, and that’s why the C.I.A. is out of there.”

In the rest of the essay Hersh explains how the CIA has been sidelined to prevent internal opposition to ambitious new military campaigns.

The Administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since last summer. Much of the focus is on the accumulation of intelligence and targeting information on Iranian nuclear, chemical, and missile sites, both declared and suspected. The goal is to identify and isolate three dozen, and perhaps more, such targets that could be destroyed by precision strikes and short-term commando raids. “The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible,” the government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon told me.
Some of the missions involve extraordinary coöperation. For example, the former high-level intelligence official told me that an American commando task force has been set up in South Asia and is now working closely with a group of Pakistani scientists and technicians who had dealt with Iranian counterparts.

Research of a far more invasive variety was unacceptable to the White House with Iraq; so I personally suspect this is merely a prequel to something more.

The immediate goals of the attacks would be to destroy, or at least temporarily derail, Iran’s ability to go nuclear. But there are other, equally purposeful, motives at work. The government consultant told me that the hawks in the Pentagon, in private discussions, have been urging a limited attack on Iran because they believe it could lead to a toppling of the religious leadership. “Within the soul of Iran there is a struggle between secular nationalists and reformers, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the fundamentalist Islamic movement,” the consultant told me. “The minute the aura of invincibility which the mullahs enjoy is shattered, and with it the ability to hoodwink the West, the Iranian regime will collapse”—like the former Communist regimes in Romania, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz share that belief, he said.

There's our delusional psychosis. I recommend insulin shock. The students demonstrating against the mullahs are now quiescent, since the "Axis of Evil" speech virtually obliterated support for the pro-democracy movement in Iran (as with all such movements, the Iranian pro-democracy movement was very nationalistic; the fear of a US attack suddenly made opponents of the state look like US stooges in the eyes of the middle class). Support for the movement was confined to a tiny minority of students in the first place; had it ever threatened the mullahs, they would merely have bussed in a few hundred thousand peasants from the surrounding countryside; the farmers who won land in the revolution are of course still devout supporters of the Islamic Revolution.

There's a lot more in the article, explaining how Rumsfeld intends to set up international hit squads that can operate without Congressional oversight, and even set up front-groups pretending to recruit for al-Qaeda or al-Zarqawi. According to Hersh, the goal is to set up EL Salvador-style hit squads that can operate in Yemen, Algeria... anywhere. It's not the first time:

The Pentagon has tried to work around the limits on covert activities before. In the early nineteen-eighties, a covert Army unit was set up and authorized to operate overseas with minimal oversight. The results were disastrous. The Special Operations program was initially known as Intelligence Support Activity, or I.S.A., and was administered from a base near Washington (as was, later, Gray Fox). It was established soon after the failed rescue, in April, 1980, of the American hostages in Iran, who were being held by revolutionary students after the Islamic overthrow of the Shah’s regime. At first, the unit was kept secret from many of the senior generals and civilian leaders in the Pentagon, as well as from many members of Congress. It was eventually deployed in the Reagan Administration’s war against the Sandinista government, in Nicaragua. It was heavily committed to supporting the Contras. By the mid-eighties, however, the I.S.A.’s operations had been curtailed, and several of its senior officers were courtmartialled following a series of financial scandals, some involving arms deals. The affair was known as “the Yellow Fruit scandal,” after the code name given to one of the I.S.A.’s cover organizations—and in many ways the group’s procedures laid the groundwork for the Iran-Contra scandal.

Indeed, it looked like a good idea in 1981, too. The ending is always squalid: if you empower a cadre of commandoes to kill secretly all over the world, how do you ensure they don't just go into crime? Many would argue that this is already an urgent dilemma.

UPDATE: Iranian Truth posts about this; Unfogged does too; Stratfor seems distressed that Hersh wrote the article:

Another explanation is that Hersh is being used as a vector for disinformation directed against the Iranians. The United States has been using psychological means to cause the Iranians to reconsider their position, including intrusion over Iranian territory by U.S. warplanes. Leaking a covert operation where there is none to Hersh would be a clever way to increase the pressure. Deliberate disinformation would certainly be more comforting these winter nights than imagining a ticked-off intelligence officer spilling his guts to Hersh.
It comes down to this: On the broadest level, Hersh's story simply restates what is known or logical. On a deeper level, it reveals details that, if true, could cripple U.S. intelligence collection in Iran. That Hersh would publish this is a given. That he could get hold of information like this from the CIA is a crisis.

Hossein Derrakhshan (Editor: Myself), like Whoman (Iranian Truth) is unimpressed with the supposition that an invasion of Iran would simply cause the regime there to implode.

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Comments on this Post:
Great post and I agree that H is scaring the shit out of us.
The over-riding flavor of this view, esp the denutting of the CIA, is that Iraq is such an unmitigated mess, the American public will need a new diversion however stupid, misinformed, and dangerous.
So it was either Iran or N Korea and we saw who received the "diplomacy" and who didn't.

Posted by: calmo at January 22, 2005 06:26 PM

An attack on Iran would be madness. What scares me the most is that this doesn't matter to the Bush administration because they're so lost in delusional psychosis, as you aptly described it.

Posted by: Al-Muhajabah at January 22, 2005 08:29 PM

Thanks for stopping by, both of you. I've read your comments in the past with pleasure (at other sites) and I hope you'll be stopping by more in the future.

Posted by: James R MacLean at January 23, 2005 02:55 AM

Let's just speculate here. The U.S. is due to be driven out of Iraq by a Sunni/Baathist/Islamicist insurgency. The result is a Shiite/Sunni civil war. Heading the Shiite list in the upcoming election is SCIRI, an Iranian sponsored group. Given that the U.S. withdrawal would spark intervention by neighboring countries, would one expect the Iranian regime to remain passive or indifferent to the events unfolding in Iraq? Wouldn't one expect a crude attempt to warn the Iranians off, especially given the Bush/Saudi connection and the Sunni oppression of the large Shiite popultaion on the western shores of the oil-producing Persian Gulf? How do you spell "pickle" in Arabic script?

Posted by: john c. halasz at January 23, 2005 11:41 AM

I dunno john, the US doesn't have an extensive history of being driven out of anywhere. Those lame questions by the senators to Rice about an exit strategy underscore a lengthy commitment to a continuing presence in Iraq, no? The speculation that US forces leave this 'tender democracy' to fend for itself anytime soon is more than I can imagine.

Posted by: calmo at January 24, 2005 01:23 AM

One of the deleted passages (I delete about 60% or more of what I type into this web site) was a sarcastic reference to SCIRI, an organization that operated out of Iran from about 1980 until 2003; its founders lived in Iran after the Iraqi invasion of Iran (one was assassinated right after returning to Iraq). SCIRI militia, the Badr Brigades, has been the main militia supportive of the post-war Iraqi state.

Likewise, the one respected politician in Iraq to countenance contacts and negotiations with the US is Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani--a native of Qom, Iran. An invasion of Iran would, I suspect, immediately make the occupation of Iraq much more difficult, as would be the case in Afghanistan. Friendly governments in Tajikistan and Azerbaijan would likely implode.

As you mentioned, there is a large Shi'a population in Saudi Arabia, in ash-Sharqiyah Province (the eastern 4th of the country--where most of the KSA's oil is located); I doubt there is a chance that they would seek autonomy, but Juan Cole thinks it's enough of an issue to be a headache for Riyadh should a partition of Iraq be contemplated; should Iran and Iraq be plunged into war, it could easily spiral into a massive battle not only between US forces and a huge share of the Muslim population, but also between Sunni and Shi'a versions of Islamic patioritism.

Posted by: James R MacLean at January 24, 2005 02:11 AM

Hmmm. Close, Calmo, but I would speculate that the real goal here is to create a series of "sovereign bases" (much like those of the UK in Cyprus, or that of the USA in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba); then, yes, the fledgling democracy in Iraq would be left to fend for itself.

Posted by: James R MacLean at January 24, 2005 02:14 AM

Maybe I just lack the imagination to envisage a cluster of stategically placed US bases that would referee/monitor/support a country that may respond to the slightest pull-back in US presence by collapsing into total anarchy. [This does sound like it comes from the Rumsfeld drawing board.]
Civil war would be an attractive alternative, but I have my doubts that this could be engineered. It does not look promising.

Posted by: calmo at January 25, 2005 06:45 AM

I believe Iraq is a going to be a cyberpunk model of the future USA that the Bush Administration has in mind.

Posted by: James R MacLean at January 25, 2005 08:44 PM