19 November 2005

Pre-War Intelligence; Post-War Stupidity

Sorry few links, no facts, just observations and ramblings, follow along if you dare.

I've been re-reading Cryptonomicon recently (It resonates differently after reading The Baroque Cycle).

Its plotlines about cryptanalysis got me thinking about the current debate over intelligence. That book makes a pretty convincing case that intelligence was a deciding factor in the Allies swift victory in WWII (less than 7 years from the invasion of Poland to the VJ day)

In WWII the good guys had an amazing and comprehensive amount of intelligence. Yet huge errors that killed thousands more fighters on our side than seemed necessary in retrospect were made throughout the conflict. They had most of the important codes of the bad guys, and the bad guys were too arrogant to adjust to the facts as they presented themselves. The scene in Cryptonomicon where Admiral Yamamoto realizes that his communications have been compromised just as he's being shot out of the sky is comical.

The current mess isn't nearly as funny.

Collecting intelligence in Stalinist states (like North Korea, Syria, and formerly Iraq) is virtually impossible. When the state makes paranoia a part of the very structure of all human interactions than foreign 'wet' intelligence doesn't work.

Yet critics of the administration behave as if failures to collect perfect information in this atmosphere was part of some nefarious plot to deceive the U.S. people (ignoring the fact that these failures and false assumptions span Clinton as well as Bush's administrations and were reinforced by foreign intelligence, as well).

To paraphrase Sec. Rumsfeld, you go to war with the intelligence you have, not with the intelligence you wish you had. We still wouldn't know if Saddam had stockpiles of WMD had we not invaded. Inspections would have NEVER been conclusive. Saddam played too many games and the UN inspection regime was too reliant on being guided around the country by Iraqi minders to ever feel confident that the absence of evidence was truly evidence of the absence of WMD (and lest I forget to mention, WMD was one of many justifications for invasion, it wasn't the only case, or the strongest case for toppling a vicious dictator in charge of one of the world's largest militaries).

With the sanctions falling apart, and with European countries eager to sell Saddam whatever he was willing to buy, those WMD that weren't there in 2002 would surely well be on there way to being produced in scary quantities by 2006 had there never been an invasion.

The sanctimonious and wrong-headed bleating of many Democrats who now want to pretend that they were fooled into voting for the war would be laughable if it weren't so sad.

The polls would suggest that their bleating has drowned out the truth for the moment, hopefully that can be corrected before election time, and should the American people continue to listen to the bleating of sheep they will find themselves at the mercy of wolves.

Here's hoping that bloggers and projects like OSM.org will serve a sheepdog function and prevent the American people from becoming potentially victimized sheeple.

And one more lesson from WWII, how much better would the world have been had Hitler been strongly opposed and even fought in 1935 instead of 1939?

(and another thing to consider, what kind of insurgency would the Nazis have mounted had they been crushed before they really got started? Without knowing what the alternative would have been, early intervention might have seemed like a costly mistake that lead to a low-grade insurgency. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?)


UPDATE: I've been carnivalized. (Yipee). All those clicking through and reading this, stick around, look around and drop words of encouragement, or tell me where to stick it, just let me know what you think.

Glenn Reynolds wrote, "Immodest Proposals draws a Neal Stephenson connection, based on Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon. (I loved that book, but I find this comparison troubling.)"(He's being his usual inscrutable self, was he troubled by what I wrote, or by the difficulties of intelligence collection in Stalinist states? and, Hey, nobody else managed to trouble him, that's a victory in itself in my book)

2 comments:

Robert Green said...

there is no basis to say "surely there would have been WMD by 2006". none. it's just bullshit. every piece of evidence garnered from the reality based world, where things like empirical evidence and expert testimony matter, shows quite the opposite. let's look at your 4 year period that you hypothesize. from 1998-2002, according to David Kay (but certainly not limited to him, Blix and El baradei and Scott Ritter as well--all people who actually went and looked), Sadaam did nothing to reconstituted his weapons programs. what little tatters that remained in 1998 were destroyed by Clinton's bombings, which, of course, were opposed by Republicans in a manner so coarse and vile as to beggar description.

but i'm sure you didn't give a shit then, it was all about blow-jobs. making sweeping fact-challenged statements such as yours noted above as a way to reinforce a not-unreasonable point otherwise is silly, and may (or may not, i'm not digging through your site on the evidence of this post) indicate your lack of intellect or disingenuousness. either way, a bummer that a fan of a book as great as Cryptonomicon could be so dishonest.

XWL said...

Robert: I'm amazed that someone could manage to misquote the article that they are commenting on.

What I said was, "those WMD that weren't there in 2002 would surely well be on there way to being produced in scary quantities by 2006 had there never been an invasion."

First counterfactuals are in impossible to say one way or another if they are wrong or right.

Second you imply that I thought they would have mass quantities of WMD, that's clearly not what the above quote says. What I said, and what I meant, and what I expected anyone to understand from what I wrote was that the processes that lead to making WMD would begin unabated without the sanction regime that existed since the end of Desert Storm.

Guess what, sanctions were falling apart and European nations were lining up to sell Saddam whatever he could afford to buy.

This is like the attempts at war critics to claim that the administration claimed imminence when all their statements were warnings to act before threats became imminent.

I know I won't convince the Roberts of the world, but I'm just making sure the record is set straight for anyone else following these links.

And thanks for dropping by, I enjoy all eyeballs, critics and supporters alike.