Afghanistan Heads South

An Economist magazine editorial laments the fact that the situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating. With all the concern about Iraq, and the general consensus that the war in Afghanistan was much more justified than the war in Iraq, the news that Afghanistan is following Iraq down the tubes is discouraging.

Bad Intelligence on Iraq

It has become so accepted that the Bush administration lied about the intelligence to get us into war in Iraq that one forgets how reprehensible it was. Thousands of people have died because of this decision: 2,000 plus American soldiers, but untold (because the administration won't tell) numbers of Iraqi military and civilians, as well -- probably in the high tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands.

A new article in Foreign Affairs documents the Administration's misuse of intelligence. One must ask, however, if the author was the NIO for the Middle East, why did he stay in his job? Since he did stay in his job during the period when intelligence was being misused, he undercuts his integrity to protest today. That doesn't mean that the facts he reports should be ignored.

The LA Times reports on a new British book that similarly claims that the US and Britain doubted the strength of the information with which they justified their invasion of Iraq.

While there may be some legal questions about whether Bush violated any law, particularly since any relevant law would probably have been international and not domestic, this purposeful misleading of the American people seems like it should be an impeachable offense.

The Foreign Affairs summary of its article is as follows:

Summary: During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, writes the intelligence community's former senior analyst for the Middle East, the Bush administration disregarded the community's expertise, politicized the intelligence process, and selected unrepresentative raw intelligence to make its public case.

State Dept Dumps Career Weapons Experts

Knight Ridder reports that the State Department is dumping or passing over career Foreign Service and Civil Service weapons experts to hire or promote outsiders who are loyal to the Bush Administration. It appears that at least some of the problems are left over from (now UN Ambassador) John Bolton's reign over arms control policy at State. One of Condi Rice's best moves was to get him out of the State building, but apparently he left some problems behind for a "realist" foreign policy.

Actually, such personnel shake-ups are not unusual. I left the Foreign Service partly because Clinton and Gore wanted to shrink the government payroll any way they could, and pressured people like me, working on non-proliferation issues, to leave. (Remember those good old days when the President actually worried about how much money the government was spending.) Another reason I left was that the Republicans in Congress were blocking US implementation of its nuclear agreement with North Korea through KEDO. My job as the senior diplomatic working on scientific issues at the American Embassy in Rome turned out to require a lot of time begging Italy and other European countries to donate money to makeup for American shortfalls in funding KEDO because Republicans in Congress didn't like it. I thought the US should live up to its treaty obligations.

Also, the personnel issues are not unusual. When I worked for then-Assistant Secretary Richard Clarke (of 9/11 fame) in State's old Politico-Military bureau during the Bush I administration, I got promoted while I was assigned there, based on my performance in my previous job in Brasilia, Brazil. Clarke did not want me to have a supervisory position in his bureau, although my new rank required it. To Clarke's credit, his opposition was not political. He wanted someone who was a more aggressive bureaucratic infighter than I was. Nevertheless, he finally agreed (grudgingly) to allow me to hold a supervisory position on missile proliferation matters.

Data Mining after NSA Phone Surveillance?

This Christian Science Monitor story on data mining outlines the latest threat to individual privacy from the government, following the furor over NSA's monitoring of telephone calls. Of course, this is only what the government is doing. Corporations are already deep into data mining, mainly to figure out what we like and how to sell us stuff, but it could get more nefarious.