Here's another interesting article.
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Making the Facts Fit the Case for War
February 8, 2004
By RICHARD GOODWIN
CONCORD, Mass.
In 1846 President James Polk announced that Mexican troops
had fired on American soldiers on American soil, and he
took the country to a war that eventually gained it
California, New Mexico and Arizona. Was the disputed soil
ours? Probably not. Did Polk distort the information he
had? Almost certainly. He wanted the territory, and he
needed a war to get it.
A first-term representative warned that if you "allow the
president to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall
deem it necessary to repel an invasion . . . you allow him
to make war at pleasure." For these words, Abraham Lincoln
received the usual reward of political courage: he
forfeited any chance of a return to Congress and was
retired to private life for more than a decade. (Although
he would do quite well after that.)
Our current dispute over the intelligence that led to the
invasion of Iraq seems to be yet another illustration of
this eternal principle: presidents and other decision
makers usually get the intelligence they want. This doesn't
mean that intelligence reports should be ignored, but that
they must be viewed with skepticism. And in my years in
government service, I had the misfortune to see desire win
out over skepticism too many times.
In 1961, when I was 28 and fresh to the Kennedy White House
from the campaign trail, I climbed to the upper reaches of
the State Department for a high-level meeting to discuss
the planned invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. Almost
every top official involved in the operation, except for
the president, was there. Richard Bissell, a legendary
figure of cold war intelligence, the man responsible for
the U-2 spy plane, assured us that once the American-backed
rebels had established themselves, the Cuban people would
rise up against Castro. Rather tentatively, I asked Bissell
how we had reached this conclusion. He calmly turned to the
general sitting beside him and said, rather casually, "We
have an N.I.E. on that, don't we?" referring to a
classified National Intelligence Estimate. The general
nodded.
In fact, no such intelligence estimate existed. But
Bissell's primary interest in intelligence data was that it
help him get presidential approval of an operation to which
he had devoted so much energy. Perhaps, having received so
many assurances from Cuban exiles, he truly believed the
claim. But he was wrong and John F. Kennedy was wrong to
trust him - and the disaster that unfolded on the Cuban
shore in April was the result.
To his credit, President Kennedy learned from the debacle.
He reorganized his intelligence apparatus and brought
advisers whose instincts and moral compasses he trusted -
including his brother Bobby - into the inner circle of
foreign policy deliberation. Most important, the lesson
that intelligence and military advisers had to be
thoroughly challenged guided Kennedy as he later steered
the country through the Cuban missile crisis.
Unfortunately, this lesson was largely lost on the next
administration. In 1965, the duly elected but deposed
president of the Dominican Republic, Juan Bosch, was
leading a revolution against the military cabal that had
displaced him. A panicky telegram from our ambassador
detailing (largely imaginary) horrors in Santo Domingo's
streets led Lyndon B. Johnson to send in the Marines.
With our troops already in the air, Johnson called a White
House meeting to explain the decision he had already made.
Gathered in the Cabinet Room, we were told by William
Raborn, the incoming head of the C.I.A., that Communists
had infiltrated, perhaps even dominated, the Bosch
insurgency. That belief, not any supposed bloodshed, was of
course the real reason for Johnson's intervention.
After the meeting, Bill Moyers, also a Johnson aide, and I
met privately with some C.I.A. staff members. "Who were
these Communists," we asked, "and how do we know?" We were
given incredibly flimsy evidence, such as that one Bosch
confederate had been seen in an apartment building
suspected of housing a Communist cell. It proved nothing.
Yet 20,000 marines had been sent to forestall this enemy
whose very existence was suspect.
The crisis ended relatively peacefully, but not before a
storm of criticism - from the public, the press and
Congress - descended on the president, bringing his
"honeymoon" to an abrupt end. Unlike Kennedy, Johnson made
no change to the intelligence system that had misled us.
After I resigned from the White House, in 1967, I was asked
by the Pentagon to attend a meeting to assess our Vietnam
intelligence. The group consisted of several Nobel laureate
scientists and a few others including the political
scientist Richard Neustadt and the economist John Kenneth
Galbraith. What concerned us were the military's "body
count" figures of how many we had killed and also the
"infiltration rate" statistics on the flow of men and
supplies from North Vietnam to the South. When we looked
behind the comforting figures, it was clear that the method
of calculating them was prone to enormous error. The same
bodies were counted by different units, and often just
guessed at. The infiltration rate was based on the
observations of spies along the Ho Chi Minh trail, who
often concealed themselves in the nearby jungle to evade
death or capture, and therefore had no idea what was
contained in the covered trucks rolling by.
We concluded that the figures the government triumphantly
publicized to justify its claims of success could have been
off by 10 percent or by 300 percent because "the data is so
soft that we cannot state with confidence whether we have
been doing better or worse militarily over the past year."
These conclusions were ignored. The generals and the
president wanted higher body counts and lower infiltration
numbers. And that's what they got.
Those now trying to figure out what went wrong before the
war in Iraq should bear in mind a simple truth: we are more
likely to "know" what we want to know than what we don't
want to know. That human flaw is built into the very
process of making intelligence estimates. Perhaps the only
way to counter it is if those who make the final decision
beware taking a large risk on what is, inevitably,
speculation. As Kennedy told the National Security Council
in the days after the Bay of Pigs, "we're not going to have
any search for scapegoats . . . the final responsibilities
of any failure is mine, and mine alone."
Richard Goodwin was a White House assistant to Presidents
Kennedy and Johnson.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/08/opinion/08GOOD.html?ex=1077252045&ei=1&en=9a4b445b7305a423
