Unused Intelligence

“KOLKO: Like the CIA, the military has some acute strategic thinkers who have learned from bitter experiences. The analyses of the U.S. Army’s Strategic Studies Institute – to name one of many – are often very insightful and critical.

The problem, of course, is that few (if any) at the decisive levels pay any attention to the critical ruminations that the military and CIA consistently produce. There is no shortage of insight among U.S. official analysts – the problem that policy is rarely formulated with objective knowledge is a constraint on it. Ambitious people, who exist in ample quantity, say what their superiors wish to hear and rarely, if ever, contradict them. Former CIA head George Tenet is the supreme example of that, and what the CIA emphasized for the president or Donald Rumsfeld was essentially what they wanted to hear. While he admits the CIA knew far less regarding Iraq than it should have, Tenet’s recent memoir is a good example of desire leading reporting objectively. The men and women who rise to the top are finely tuned to the relationship between ambition and readiness to contradict their superiors with facts. The entire mess is Iraq, to cite just one example, was predicted. If reason and clarity prevailed, America’s role in the world would be utterly different.”

The US Will Lose War Regardless What it Does by Gabriel Kolko
AntiWar.com