NIE Reports Progress in Iraq
Well, I know we have to take these things with a grain or two of salt, but apparently the new NIE reports progress in Iraq. It alleges that the evidence indicates that the surge helped--a conclusion I find congenial, of course, so I have to be a bit more skeptical than usual of that.
The Times story--which seems rather hastily written and contains at least one sentence that, apparently because of a missing word, doesn't make any sense--seems to suggest that this report was compiled before the recent fighting, so I guess it doesn't take that into account. And I have no idea how it might modify the conclusion.
Does anyone have any sense of how seriously we should take these things? I wonder whether there's any way of guessing how reliable these are compared, say, to the heavily propagandized reports that came out before the invasion. Have the intelligence services learned their lesson? Or are they under even more pressure now to portray an improving Iraq?
Well, I know we have to take these things with a grain or two of salt, but apparently the new NIE reports progress in Iraq. It alleges that the evidence indicates that the surge helped--a conclusion I find congenial, of course, so I have to be a bit more skeptical than usual of that.
The Times story--which seems rather hastily written and contains at least one sentence that, apparently because of a missing word, doesn't make any sense--seems to suggest that this report was compiled before the recent fighting, so I guess it doesn't take that into account. And I have no idea how it might modify the conclusion.
Does anyone have any sense of how seriously we should take these things? I wonder whether there's any way of guessing how reliable these are compared, say, to the heavily propagandized reports that came out before the invasion. Have the intelligence services learned their lesson? Or are they under even more pressure now to portray an improving Iraq?
posted by Winston Smith at
5:43 PM
5 Comments:
If you believe anything that this administration says, you're a complete chump. Hows that?
Could be, but this isn't the administration per se.
I'm not especially knowledgeable on this, unfortunately, but my perception is that NIEs are pretty independent of the administration. After all, the same National Intelligence Council that wrote these Iraq reports was responsible for the report that blew the lid on Iran's complete lack of a nuclear weapons program after 2003. If they're a bunch of partisan lackeys, they blew that one pretty bad.
That said, I for one think that Maliki's completely botched raids against Sadr do change the situation rather drastically. Not simply because of the proximal results, i.e. a temporary increase in violence, but rather because it shows that any positive effects the surge had really did jack squat to change the fact that Maliki's government is completely ineffective and very far from achieving any kind of meaningful reconciliation with their opponents in the civil war that seems more than ever to be boiling under and waiting to erupt.
Over at Talking Points Memo Muckraker, Paul Kiel reports (quoting a piece in the WSJ that one must register to get online)
Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), a member of the House intelligence committee, is mighty suspicious -- both of the report's content and its timing: "One might ask whether the timing of the release and the apparent departure from usual procedures means this is more of a political document than an intelligence document," he tells the Journal.
As the Journal points out, "intelligence reports are often delayed by major developments that could affect the assessments, such as the Sadr fighting." This report, however, was not delayed, and there is no mention of the failed offensive in the report. It has, however, come right in time for the Petraeus and Crocker hearings next week.
The "departure from usual procedures" is that this time there is no "unclassified summary of the key conclusions and judgments" as has been disseminated with NIEs in the past.
This one reeks of politicization.
Of course the war is politicized. Where have you been, Jim?
There will be no significant policy change until the inauguration of the next president.
If then.
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