A Pretext for War

Santa brought me a copy of James Bamford’s “A Pretext for War.” It is a disturbing book that chronicles the errors and bad judgments of our so called intelligence agencies and the White House’s misuse of that bad intelligence to justify the war in Iraq. Yet for all of its virtues, it is a flawed book; it makes the same mistakes that intelligence agencies routinely make.

Intelligence gathering is a hazardous game. It is much easier to gather information of a single entity, a country, a group, or an individual. It become much more difficult to target the entire world. The amount of information gathered quickly becomes overwhelming, and virtually impossible to analyze, notice related items, and draw valid conclusions. One person reading the information gathered has a much better change of noticing relationships between two different items than two different persons reading each piece separately.

Mr. Bamford’s book makes similar mistakes, even though only one author is involved. He amasses a gigantic amount of information, but never gets around to analyzing it and drawing any valid conclusions except that the agencies are inept. So it is difficult to fault the agencies for not doing what he, himself, is able to do.

Furthermore, no one should be surprised at the ineptness of intelligence agencies and their cooking the data to fit a preconception of what it shows. These agencies have had a long history of ineptness, carrying out of illegal activities, and promoting reactionary causes.

A more disturbing part of the book, however, is the revelation of the influence the State of Israel and its American supporters, some of whom have worked directly for the Likud party, have had and are having on American foreign policy. It is as though people like Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, and Paul Wolfowitz read the fictitious Chronicles of Zion and decided that a Jewish plot to take over the world was not such a bad idea after all. Americans need to be concerned about the influence of foreign powers and their American supporters on American policy. Such influence can lead to our destruction, if it hasn’t already.