Kristan Wheaton, blogging at Sources and Methods, links to an article by Barron YoungSmith in The New Republic, purported to explore Presidential Candidate Barack Obama’s “revolutionary” proposals for intelligence-gathering.

As an aside prior to commenting on YoungSmith’s article, Wheaton works as an Intelligence Educator at the very intelligence-savvy Mercyhurst College, and moonlights as a blogger on intelligence related topics at Sources and Methods. She’s prolific, informed, non-partisan from what I have seen, and she’s in my blog roll.

I don’t know that I want to keep repeating “YoungSmith” to accord with my journalistic stylebook. Maybe this is a new affectation as alternative for hyphenated names. But I keep thinking of Senator Paine (Claude Rains) or Jim Taylor (Edward Arnold) making slight reference to poor Jefferson Smith (Jimmie Stewart) in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Since YoungSmith is identified as a “web intern” for TNR, perhaps he won’t be offended if I go with Barron out of convenience.

Barron leaves his readers little doubt as to where his sympathies lie in his opening paragraph.

Many of Barack Obama's foreign policy initiatives are designed in direct philosophical opposition to the policies--indeed, the worldview--of the Bush administration. On Iraq, Obama does not merely say that he wants to end mismanagement of the war (like John McCain), nor the war itself (like Hillary Clinton)--he says, "I don't want to just end the war. I want to end the mindset that got us in the war."

Barron apparently adheres to that strand of liberal orthodoxy that insists that war mongering or some other illicit, assumed but unspoken ulterior motives underlie all war making decisions by the Bush Administration. Rather than any genuine motivation to, I don’t know, fight terrorism and the nation states that sponsor and support terrorism. Of course, this comes as no surprise from someone who has helped produce a book called U.S. vs. Them: How a Half-Century of Conservatism Has Undermined America's Security.

Barron applies his conceit of ulterior motives to a little remarked on idea of Obama’s, that of transforming the post of Director of National Intelligence (DNI) into a fixed term, presumably non-partisan position like that of the Federal Reserve Chairman:

It's common for Democrats to promise an end to Bush-style politicization of intelligence. But the way that Obama frames the issue--likening the DNI to the independent, technocratic Chairman of the Federal Reserve--indicates that his view of the intelligence process is ontologically opposed to the way conservatives see it. As Franklin Foer has explained in detail in The New Republic, the Bush administration justified its pre-war intel abuses using a methodological critique that dates back, at least, to the 1970s (some trace it back to Edmund Burke's distrust of the Enlightenment).

The administration argued that the CIA put too much trust in the social-science methods cultivated by people like the CIA's "father of intelligence analysis," Sherman Kent. Abram Shulsky, who ran the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans--the outfit that produced "alternate intelligence" to justify the Iraq war--decried "the view that intelligence is, at bottom, an endeavor similar to social science, if not equivalent to it," which led to the pernicious belief that "intelligence analysis can be divorced from the policy process and, indeed, be apolitical in nature. As a result, one can even talk about creating within the intelligence community an analytic arm along the lines of a 'world-class think-tank'."

When liberals start dissing Edmund Burke to discredit their political adversaries, their hackles are up, way up. But there’s one heck of a dense set of assumptions in that last paragraph, and worthy of some specific criticism.

No one who has spent any time evaluating the metrics, analytic basis, modeling or predictive assumptions in that miasma called modern Social Science would fail to understand how great an insult is intended by “the view that intelligence is, at bottom, an endeavor similar to social science, if not equivalent to it.” Shulsky no doubt would fully agree with the sentiment Barron in the next paragraph attributes to Obama, that “intelligence assessment is a non-ideological exercise in finding out what's true and what's not,” or that the Intelligence Community (IC) trades first and foremost in “empirically-verifiable facts.”

The IC also necessarily involves subjective judgments, estimates and forecasts, a fair amount of deduction, and prediction, else it provides little value to decision-makers. This nuance ignored by Obama and other Bush critics, and likewise omitted by Barron in his analysis, more accurately gets to the heart of what Shulsky, Rumsfeld and others were trying to accomplish with the IC.

Another aside, this one to critique the TNR piece by Foer that Barron quotes admiringly. (Good choice for an intern.) Foer runs through a litany of stereotypic, cherry picked examples of Bush Administration animus towards the sciences (foremost, the social sciences, but hard sciences too). You’d be hard pressed to glean any even-handedness in Foer’s screed, given that any policy deriving from the “scientific basis” for anthropogenic global warming is good, any objection based on faulty or inadequate science, or worse, pseudo-science is bad.

Foer bases his assault on some imagined Conservatism on this premise:

Since its inception, modern American conservatism has harbored a suspicion of experts, who, through adherence to inductive reasoning and academic methodologies, claim to provide objective research and analysis. To be sure, this social-scientific approach has its limits. Conservatives have raised genuinely troubling questions about its predilection for downplaying the role of "culture" and "values" in shaping human behavior. But the Bush administration has adopted a far more extreme version of this critique: It takes the radically postmodern view that "science," "objectivity," and "truth" are guises for an ulterior, leftist agenda; that experts are so incapable of dispassionate and disinterested analysis that their work doesn't even merit a hearing. And the results have been disastrous.

That’s gross distortion of the position of those who oppose Progressive policy and agenda, whoever well such policy prescriptions are wrapped in the trappings of a science that most of its proponents do not understand a wit (ex., Al Gore). What Conservatives (actual and neo-) have objected to is a presumption that the social scientific fads of today can be counted on as firm foundation for all manner of expansive social programs, the hidden or unintended consequences of which are poorly anticipated or outright ignored.

But note that this resistance to an ever-increasing Government role as Solution to Problems not yet defined, is transformed by Foer and his progressive ilk into a radical view that dispenses with truth. Nothing could be further from “the truth,” as what galls conservatives most is how lightly or little Progressives want to treat with actual truth and consequences, rather than hypotheticals and extremes.

Back to Barron. Barron attempts an even-handed assessment of the IC in acknowledging error, but also doing well in learning from it’s mistakes:

Finding the truth is--of course--a difficult task, and even those who strive for empiricism and objectivity inevitably commit errors. That's true even when the White House and Congress are not pressuring them. But, contrary to current, unwarranted popular perceptions, the IC is actually quite good at doing its job, learning from its mistakes, and adapting its procedures to meet new challenges.

But that’s a fig leaf for Barron,  who evidently views the products of the IC as only acceptable when they fit his (and Obama’s) preconceived and narrow interests, and again, the conceit of “cooking the books:”

Most recently, there was the scuffle over last year's National Intelligence Estimate, which can only be understood in the context of the Bush administration's past attempts to pressure the CIA over Iraq and Iran.

Because the CIA felt the need to push back against the Bush administration's constant pressure to find incriminating evidence about Iran, the Agency issued an NIE that basically slapped the administration in the face--creating a headline that rendered U.S. policy on Iran's uranium enrichment program all but inert until 2009. The Bush administration started this cycle of recrimination, and the end result is that Iran continues to enrich uranium--the most difficult part of making a nuclear bomb--and the U.S. has been helpless to pressure Tehran to stop, to the point where the Europeans were so alarmed they decided to take up the slack.

If the Bush administration had taken a pragmatic approach to Iran's activities, rather than cooking the books to fit its own views, we would have been able to have a substantive, gradual policy that increases pressure on Iran in proportion to its progress on uranium enrichment. And the IC and the administration wouldn't be looking over their shoulders at each other, so suspicious that it's near-impossible for the U.S. to figure out, and devise a rational response to, the true situation on the ground.

So there we have it. Partisans and agenda-mongerers within the IC produced in the latest NIE a deeply flawed, politicized, and intentionally distorted assessment of Iran’s nuclear aims and programs, as a tit-for-tat for earlier politicization. And Barron concludes, as does Obama, Democrats, and TNR, that it’s all Bush’s fault. If he hadn’t been trying to push his foreign policy objectives against their better judgment and advise, he only had himself to blame when they responded with a political missive that short-circuited US foreign policy.

And if Iran acquires functional nuclear weaponry as an unintended consequence? That will be Bush’s fault, too. Natch.

Last week, foreign policy luminary Henry Kissinger issued a cautionary rebuttal to the recent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran, writing at the Washington Post.

Kissinger, who’s first hand experience with both Intelligence and US foreign policy could be accounted as unrivaled, warns against Intelligence producers increasingly “tempted into the roles of surrogate policymakers and advocates,” and serving as “a kind of check on, instead of a part of, the executive branch.”

Since publication, Kissinger created something of a stir among Intelligence professionals and educators, who object to some of Kissinger’s conclusions. Several suggest that as a key architect of Nixonian foreign policy, Kissinger would of course object to public disclosure of Intelligence as a means of confronting or confounding an “ill-advised” foreign policy.

Perhaps, but I think he hits on a maxim vital for both the Intelligence Community, and policy-makers, that should be embraced by partisans and non-partisans alike: Intelligence should not be politicized, and Intelligence producers should not make or drive policy.

That’s Kissinger’s take-away on the externals of the release of the NIE on Iran, but he also takes issue with how the NIE assesses the Iranian nuclear threat:

The "Key Judgments" released by the intelligence community last week begin with a dramatic assertion: "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program." This sentence was widely interpreted as a challenge to the Bush administration policy of mobilizing international pressure against alleged Iranian nuclear programs. It was, in fact, qualified by a footnote whose complex phraseology obfuscated that the suspension really applied to only one aspect of the Iranian nuclear weapons program (and not even the most significant one): the construction of warheads. That qualification was not restated in the rest of the document, which continued to refer to the "halt of the weapons program" repeatedly and without qualification.

The reality is that the concern about Iranian nuclear weapons has had three components: the production of fissile material, the development of missiles and the building of warheads. Heretofore, production of fissile material has been treated as by far the greatest danger, and the pace of Iranian production of fissile material has accelerated since 2006. So has the development of missiles of increasing range. What appears to have been suspended is the engineering aimed at the production of warheads.

Kissinger goes on to conclude:

It is therefore doubtful that the evidence supports the dramatic language of the summary and, even less so, the broad conclusions drawn in much of the public commentary.

Whatever this NIE is, then it most surely is not a fact based, analytically sound and data supported intelligence conclusion. If what its trying to establish is how close Iran is to acquiring nuclear weapons capability, the NIE skirts the essence of the question, according to Kissinger.

Kissinger sums up his warning on intelligence as policy maker with this admonition:

I am extremely concerned about the tendency of the intelligence community to turn itself into a kind of check on, instead of a part of, the executive branch. When intelligence personnel expect their work to become the subject of public debate, they are tempted into the roles of surrogate policymakers and advocates. Thus the deputy director for intelligence estimates explained the release of the NIE as follows: Publication was chosen because the estimate conflicted with public statements by top U.S. officials about Iran, and "we felt it was important to release this information to ensure that an accurate presentation is available." That may explain releasing the facts but not the sources and methods that have been flooding the media. The paradoxical result of the trend toward public advocacy is to draw intelligence personnel more deeply than ever into the public maelstrom.

The executive branch and the intelligence community have gone through a rough period. The White House has been accused of politicizing intelligence; the intelligence community has been charged with promoting institutional policy biases. The Key Judgments document accelerates that controversy, dismaying friends and confusing adversaries.

Intelligence personnel need to return to their traditional anonymity. Policymakers and Congress should once again assume responsibility for their judgments without involving intelligence in their public justifications.

(Via Memeorandum)

Scott Johnson, writing at Powerline, notes how tactfully Kissinger describes “the subversive role taken by the intelligence agencies,” and how significant it is that someone like Kissinger in effect places such an indictment, however diplomatically.

Johnson also observes:

Once upon a time, liberals worried about the takeover of the executive branch by intelligence or military operatives. Think back to 1962's Seven Days In May. The novel and the movie that was made of it pioneered what has become a genre unto itself. "Three Days of the Condor," for example, extended the concerns of "Seven Days In May" to the CIA. Of course, the operatives in these novels and films were always depicted as right-wing or "fascist."

But the permanent bureaucracy that mans the intelligence community and the State Department is a virtual preserve of the left. The visible role undertaken by the CIA in undermining administration foreign policy should be a concern to Americans of all stripes. Yet the progressive love of power has undermined the left's concern about democratic niceties.

That’s my take exactly.

Partisans on both sides, seeking short term political gain, treat each disclosure, leak of classified information, each policy parry from Intelligence producers as good and justified when it gores the other guy’s ox, and treason when it gores ones own.

That’s not just short-sighted; it’s disastrous for our democracy. I don’t want my Intelligence producers to take over the jobs of the Intelligence consumers. For one, we’re not qualified. We were not elected, appointed or charged to make policy.

But more importantly, by doing so we enable those who have the responsibility and public trust in making policy to neglect their trust and fail their responsibilities.

Not that this doesn’t happen all the time, in all manner of ways and means.

But I don’t think our nation’s Intelligence analysts should enable the neglect and malpractice of policy-makers, by doing their jobs for them.

Our local high school has been hosting a Participation in Government speaker series. On Wednesday, November 28, they hosted a session on Pre-emptive War, the War in Iraq, and a potential War with Iran, with former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter. Until this week, efforts to “find” an additional speaker with contrasting views had been unsuccessful. Then a fellow parent shared with me about his appearance, discussed my willingness to step forward, and they asked me to participate.

The format allowed each of us 10 minutes to present our views on the three topics in turn, followed by student questions. I started. I used a brief outline, Ritter appeared to speak extemporaneously. Students and an adult or two asked questions, and towards the end the teacher who organizes the sessions augmented with questions of his own. Most allowed both of us to respond, but most were primarily directed at Ritter, but he was often offered to let me lead in response and I always had an opportunity to rebut or otherwise offer my own response.

My first impression of Ritter was of a very professional and courteous, even likeable man. His military background is evident. He was very respectful during the entire exchange, and had researched me at least as thoroughly as I researched him.

Here’s an outline of what I presented to open the session:

Pre-emptive War:

Just War Concept -- the morality of war

Why and How wars start

Aggressive, reactive, retributive, pre-emptive

Cold War, MAD, emergence of terrorism

Lessons from September 11^th:

War as Risk Management

Threat of Nuclear proliferation, other WMD

Terror as proxy for state to state warfare

Potentially catastrophic cost of inaction

The War in Iraq:

Gulf War and “Cessation” of Hostilities

UN Security Council Resolutions (1991-2002)

Iraq Regime Change as official US policy (1998)

9/11 Aftermath, change in strategy:

Waiting for imminence can be catastrophic

State sponsors of terror, “safe harbor” & terror proxies

WMD Proliferation as terror threat

Middle East and Regional Threats

Human Rights and Democracy Promotion

Pre- and Post-Invasion Intelligence

Possible War with Iran:

Iran “at war” with US since 1979

Iranian proxies: Hezbollah, Shiite Militias

Explosively Formed Projectiles (EFP)

IEDs, weapons, funding, terrorist training

Regional influence & destabilization

Human Rights and Democratization

Iranian nuclear program:

Financial & technical resources driven by intent

Repeated obstruction and deception towards IAEA

Avowed aim the obliteration of Israel

Concerns about proliferation, “nuke by proxy”

Ritter centered his 10 minutes on the premise that the US signed international treaties, that those treaties take on the force of law, that he “swore an oath” to defend and support the constitution (he made very forceful declarations along these lines often). He quoted UN Charter, explained the prescribed military actions that the UN holds member countries can take that would be “legal” and “lawful.” He placed the entire issue of us going to war (previously in Iraq or in future in Iran or elsewhere) completely in the context of international treaty, UN mandate, with only cursory mention of the US Constitution or US war powers and authority.

I later challenged that formulation on the basis of US national sovereignty, and that the US can never sign a treaty that can abridge rights and powers granted by the Constitution (surely he can’t be enforced, either, without loss of national sovereignty. Ritter then seemed to reorient his line of reasoning to address what he felt were the unconstitutional aspects of our military actions in Iraq (and even Afghanistan).

I highlighted that for several decades, and all modern wars (since WWII), all three branches of Government have been complicit in allowing Congress to abrogate its Constitutional obligations to declare war (War Powers Act), Congressional authorizations for Presidential use of military force, etc. Hold Congress to its obligations, I’d agree, but to allow Congress to then escape responsibility and only blame the President is allowing those complicit to evade responsibility twice: first in the votes to authorize, then second in turning around and blaming the President with the results, as if they were innocent bystanders.

Ritter obviously tailored what might have been a different, more strident kind of presentation, were he not before a student audience. It really was a good, vigorous debate. He knows his UN Charter, for sure, perhaps more than he knows his Constitution, but he knows better than I, though I’m certain he cherry picks from the US defining documents. He is quite passionate and forceful, makes effective argument, and it’s hard to argue against his resume. I’m glad I didn’t. Despite his later claims to cherish US Sovereignty (“we don’t need the UN or other international problems to fix things we did ourselves, the American people can do that ourselves”), Rittre clearly buys in to the whole UN as final arbiter for Right and Wrong and international law. I responded by describing UN involvement in wars, peacekeeping as absolute disasters that usually make matters worse: UN corruption, violence, criminal activities, other malfeasance.

He made the claim that we made Al Qaeda stronger, that we haven’t beaten them anywhere, that we discredited ourselves and our ideals by our actions. He responded to questions about Guantanamo, torture, Geneva Conventions, and our standing legally, internationally, in harsh terms. Illegal, immoral, and he would immediately close Gitmo and prosecute anyone guilty of torture.

I replied with a fuller explanation of what Geneva means to signatories and non-signatories, the significance of unlawful combatants, how to conceptually deal with terrorists as POWs, when you can’t have prisoner exchanges or terms of surrender with non-state, unlawful combatants or even with the militaries of non-signatory countries. Problematic, and in other eras, such people found on the battlefield were summarily executed, and the Geneva Conventions can be found to approve of such actions. (Not that I advocate same, but that’s the problem, isn’t it?)

I also said there’s one place that we actually DID defeat Al Qaeda: Iraq. We have decimated them there, handed their hats to them, and they have suffered a terrible public relations and psychological defeat – which is the only plane on which they could ever be successful. Our military might, coupled with Iraqi resolve and citizen rejection of their foreign terrorists – smashed Al Qaeda. So much for their invincibility.

I found myself time and again returning to the context of decisions, viewing decisions in light of potential, known and unknown threats. I stressed repeatedly that we are already at war, were already at war, and that our enemies used (and use) terror proxies to do what they can’t or won’t do explicitly, openly, with their military forces. State sponsors of terror, in many ways, are more dangerous than the minions they fund, sponsor, host, hide, and direct. Safe havens should be of great concern, and nuclear and other WMD proliferation is a grave threat.

As I stated several times, there is a potentially catastrophic cost of inaction, which serious minded leaders must confront. (And do, when they are in the decision seat.)

Just based on a search I did yesterday, Ritter appeared less than 2 months ago in a college forum in Syracuse. He had appeared in a couple of forums hosted by the local public television station. As he arrived today, Ritter stated that he had earlier that day appeared at a similar forum, likewise sponsored by the local PBS affiliate. He told me that such forums often consist entirely of like-minded speakers, rather than people with contrasting views.