Getting iraq not having WMD right probably isn't that hard.
Allegedly canadian intelligence knew this, but had it all marked "for canadian eyes only" because they were worried about consequences if usa found out they weren't on board. I highly doubt canada has super-spies, the problem is usa really wanted there to be WMDs, so they came to the conclusion there was.
Sometimes I feel like I was taking crazy pills, but I distinctly remember major news agencies like the BBC calling BS with pretty hard facts about the whole WMD thing, but no one really cared. (In America or Britain anyways)
I particularly remember the mainstream media in the US cheerleading for the war and shouting down anybody who raised doubts as being "with the terrorists". The truth is that the intelligence never mattered, it was always meant as an act of revenge against the Arab/Muslim world for 9/11 and a settling of scores from the 90s Gulf War.
I remember when the US invaded Iraq(II) it was treated like a party. The media loved it, it was like a football game. And when out to eat, I saw a lot of Americans were loving it , it was entertainment. Shock and Awe, it was spectacle.
The US definitely got very good at selling wars in the last decades. I remember being fascinated with the cool videos of "surgical strikes" against Iraq in 1991. Only later I read reports that a lot of the strikes weren't exactly surgical and killed thousands of civilians.
It always irked me when people called it the Second Iraq War. From my recollections, people always referred to the war in the 90's as the Persian Gulf War and it was instigated by Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. The war in the 2000's struck me as the poorly justified invasion of another nation. While there were legitimate grievances against Iraq, they were not the types of grievances that should escalate into war.
I think it is just a colloquial numbering for clarity. That is why I do it.
The 90's war was with Iraq, that is who we were fighting against, and sometimes it is just easier to number them to differentiate from the one in the 2000's.
I remember reading reports by a German UN weapons inspector. The CIA gave them a few of their bests leads but every time the inspectors went there they found nothing or equipment that hadn't been used in years. The CIA's response was to cut them off completely. The US clearly wanted to go to war no matter what. The WMDs were just cover.
Yes - back when the US was threatening war, Iraq let in UN weapons inspectors, who would of course have gladly inspected anywhere the US/UK said the weapons were.
Everyone following the news knew at the time the US & UK couldn't direct the inspectors to the WMDs, because no WMDs existed.
> In 2002, it happened again. The CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the rest of the intelligence community had concluded that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was trying to build nuclear weapons
This from the article is false. The CIA never concluded that Iraq had a nuclear program.
In fact, the CIA was ignored when they refuted the politician's claims about the nuclear program.
True, I think every neutral party at the time knew that Iraq had no WMDs, crazy how just cause might is right we have let the instigators of Iraq war get away with it while they end up destabilizing a whole region
i recall GWB speech in UN on this. Literally everybody called BS on this, it was glaringly obvious. Then nations leaned on each side if they simply wanted war to happen (and subsequent contracts from all the change and damage) or not. It wasnt a stellar day for US, and history showed why.
Maybe it’s because “nobody’s heard of them” and “nobody listens to them” that they are allowed to come to correct conclusions?
Maybe if they were as influential as the CIA they would get a ton of political pressure to throw out their analysis and echo the current administration’s foregone conclusions?
This is an interesting take, that I think might hold some water. With a budget of $59 million (according to wikipedia), they are definitely a small entity in the grand scheme of the US Government. Big enough to run their reports, but not big enough to stop them from being ignored if they are the only (or one of the few) going against the popular consensus.
Also, while I am not anywhere familiar with them enough to know their overall track record, even if they did correctly predict the topics listed in the article 'correct', that is three items in 60 years? I'd be curious to know how their intelligence has compared with the numerous things inbetween. That would be a huge lift though.
Still fun/interesting to learn about these agencies, even as someone who grew up in the US and took higher level classes on US Government, you never really get a complete view everything.
> The most important factor in building this culture, every veteran I spoke to stated, is the unusual way that INR selects and uses analysts. The CIA and DIA tend to favor generalists. Analysts rotate between roles every two to three years, often changing countries or even regions. At INR, the average analyst has been on their topic for over 14 years. “At most of the other intel organizations you rotate out of your portfolio every two to three years,” McCarthy says. “At INR, they die at their desks.”
You know they'll take the "die at their desks" part out of context. And not absorb the fundamentally unpalatable truth that expertise is real but specific.
It's not that nobody listens, it's that the information disseminated via the media is not what's correct, but rather what is politically expedient at the moment.
Case in point: where in the article is the INR's brilliant prediction about the future of the war in Ukraine?
Their production is not public. All links in the article to past production actually go to third-party papers analyzing their historic, declassified production.
TBH the article makes it clear they are not perfect, by mentioning that they got Iran badly wrong.
Iraq was pretty easy to call. I got it largely right as a high schooler at the time it started. One thing that threw me was that we stayed so damn long, which put my “cross-border islamist group destabilizes Syria” prediction off by years. I underestimated our stomach for throwing money and lives away I guess.
The "cross-border islamist group destabilizing Syria" were spawned from Obama's "moderate rebels" who were extensively sponsored with weaponry to fight against Assad. They carried those American weapons into the invasion of Mosul because they kept failing against the battle-hardened Syrian armed forces and Iraq was a far softer target at the time.
Not sure this could have been predicted from the Iraq war though unless you are talking about the general prediction that any rebel group that the U.S. sponsors turns into a terrorist group that the U.S. bombs within a decade. Its kinda of funny when you compare news articles across years.
When thinking about this it's very important to recognize what this means exactly. The money is not put on a pile and set on fire. It goes somewhere where it has very significant impact, most likely flowing into military-industrial complex which is a huge chunk of domestic economy.
A bunch was deficit spending straight into corporate profits, so, inflationary hand-outs to the rich (and a bit to 401ks probably). Also, though far from a majority of the spending, we did ship whole pallets of cash and those just kinda vanished to wherever but I’m pretty sure if they made it back state-side it was a similar deal, deficit spending going more or less directly to someone already rich in return for very little. A quick google yeah about $12B of cash with awful accounting, and that’s just Iraq, same thing happened in Afghanistan.
In a small way, it kind of was. We used the money to produce weapons and ammunition. The producers took the cash and provided the arms. In an ideal economy, both sides would have a net gain: the producers reap profits, and the military uses the goods for a goal it (supposedly) believes is more valuable than the money spent.
But we shot the ammo, used the rifles, and detonated the bombs. And the USA didn't achieve the valuable goals it promised. So, while the arms manufacturers came out ahead, the military was left with little value. If they had put that money into research or upgrading bases overseas, then there'd be civilian profits and nice things the military could use for years.
What I gathered from this is that not the INR is full of oracles or people who have the magic skill to foresee the future but rather really smart people who based on past experience can see patterns of behavior and infer future state from that. Then, they are so small they are required to innovate and iterate on intelligence.
For sources with similar protocols/track record that you can actually see the work of, I'd look at people like Sarah Kendzior and Cory Doctorow. One focuses on how corruption and autocratic rule become entrenched in a society, the other on tech issues, with an emphasis on corporate malfeasance wrt user freedom and safety. Both are a bit melodramatic, but they also both emphasize that their predictions are based in, as you say, inferring future state from patterns of past behavior.
There's two classified versions and only one will get revealed once that situation is resolved. The version which would have gotten it wrong will just get burried to protect the agency's reputation...
INR was also the source of the concentration camp ("strategic hamlet") strategy in South Vietnam.
> The INR director saw the counterinsurgency effort's emphasis on military security as insufficient. Hilsman was much more receptive to ideas for population resettlement and control along lines advanced by Robert G. Thompson, a British consultant to the Diem government, and adopted them as his own. Kennedy asked Hilsman to prepare a paper showing how this concept could work.
I'm guessing the purpose of the CIA is to produce information which leads to political actions that yield financial benefits for the country while the purpose of INR is to produce accurate information without concern for financial benefits. The fact that the government thought it needed 2 organizations to do what is supposed to be the same job shows that neither organization is doing the full job properly. It's almost like they need 2 versions of the 'truth' so that they can weigh up convenient half-truths against inconvenient whole truths.
That's a reasonable cynical take on it. Another is that different organizations have different biases, incentives, historical perspectives, and so forth. So it's reasonable to consider different points of view.
Maybe 10 is better than 2 if there's some independence of data gathering and perspectives. In general, though, at least a couple of different takes is probably valuable--assuming they're bringing at least some diversity of experience.
People join the likes of the CIA because they know the name CIA and set it as a goal. No different from large companies.
But as people set goals the work at a certain place, people lesser-qualified slowly join the ranks until the place is a shell of what it used to be, made up of posers.
Can't let the truly skilled individuals do great work either, otherwise it'll expose the unskilled individuals' lack-of-purpose in that place, so bureaucracy gets built and gets in the way of everybody trying to do real work.
Also... I wonder if this article was specifically published because internally to INR they can see it's happening /yet again/ on some politicised matter (e.g China) and this is their cry out for help.
Is there any cherry picking in the article? Do we have statistics about when INR was correct about the course of history while other agencies were wrong?
Somewhat meta-ish question about the Vietnam War for someone who has perhaps studied the topic more: Did the US "lose" the war or did they simply stop 'bothering' with it?
In 1973 there was the Paris Peace Accords that crystallized (Communist) North Vietnam and (non-communist) South Vietnam, just like the two Koreas. Then in 1975 the north invaded:
and the US (military) basically did nothing to help the south.
Kind of like Afghanistan more recently: as long as the US had an interest in it the Taliban could not "win", but the US simply concluded that they didn't want to be involved any longer and pulled out.
If the US had continued support and presence, like with South Korea, would it have been possible that South Vietnam would still be around? Bothering with (South) Vietnam wasn't of strategic importance (?) any more, and so the US pulled out and let the chips fall where they may. If the US had continued to care about Vietnam strategically, could they have continued to make tactical (military) decisions to support the south?
The question doesn’t make much sense because “stopped bothering with it” is how rich foreign states meddling in colonized territory usually lose wars. It’s not like Vietnam was gonna invade the US, or like we couldn’t have stuck around indefinitely if we’d really wanted to.
This is just what losing looks like in that situation. Yes, we lost.
Even in wars between peer-level nations, it doesn't end with total destruction.
Did Germany lose world war 1 or did they just decide to stop bothering with it? I think the answer is clearly the former, but in the end they still kept an independent state, weren't occupied, etc.
Absolutely right, negotiated peace in some fashion is common even then. But either side might be able to follow through and entirely subjugate the other, or at least dismantle their state. That’s not on the table with very-unequal combatants. The only plausible outcome (barring expansion of the war into something more like a world war, anyway) of the Vietnam war that was a victory for north Vietnam was “the US gives up and leaves”. That’s the only way a US loss was ever gonna look—there weren’t (realistically) other ways to lose.
[edit] my point simply being that yes, that’s a loss, and in fact it was the only real way a loss could have looked, so if that’s not a “real” loss then I guess we “couldn’t lose” that war, which is plainly a strange way of looking at it.
> if that’s not a “real” loss then I guess we “couldn’t lose” that war, which is plainly a strange way of looking at it.
Well, I think the entire reason the US has been so quick to insert itself in situations like this is because there's a very real feeling that the US can't really lose these wars, because the consequences of failure are very different from, say, WW2.
If the stakes were higher for America as a nation we'd probably be significantly less likely to enter into these sorts of conflicts to begin with. And if the stakes were higher for America in the conflict for some other reason - say it was Mexico instead of Vietnam - there'd probably be significantly more political and public support for continued action and additional resources being thrown at it. But it's hard to do that when it's for the more nebulous idea of keeping the foreign power most aligned with US interests in the region in power.
Which isn't to say I disagree with the general idea - Vietnam was a loss by any reasonable sense of the word - but that I think there is a certain amount of truth to the idea that people in power really did look at Vietnam as a war that couldn't truly be lost.
I mean, i guess the other way to lose is like the soviet union in afghanistan, depending on how directly you think that lead to its collapse. But yeah, i agree with you.
If you fail all your objectives and then "stop bothering", that is losing the war.
The point of war isn't neccesarily to have your opponent destroyed, just to have them yield to your political objectives. If you give up on all your objectives , and grant your opponent everything they want, that is a loss.
I depends on what "win" would've meant. South Vietnam was the creation of the US. It didn't really have any popular support, it was dictatorship, massively and systematically corrupt, and existed because of US aid.
It's doubtful that the US could've continued to keep troops in Vietnam.
By the time (1973) the Paris Peace Accords happened, there was little US domestic support in the public, in business leaders, or in Congress. US troops hadn't done any major offensives for years, in order to keep casualties low.
By 1970, within the US Army in Vietnam, there was an level of mutiny, with entire units refusing to go on missions, officers and NCOs getting fragged (murdered) if they sent troops on missions felt to be too dangerous or pointless. The US strategy was one of attrition, and they simply couldn't continue. The Vietnamese were going to kick the foreigners out and re-unite the country, no matter how long it took.
For the whole war, the NVA / Viet Cong - largely held the initiative - around 85% of the time from '65 to '68' and then around 75% afterwards, they could choose when, and if to engage US troops and thus control their casualties to a certain extent. Once engaged, the US could bring massive firepower, but it required grunts as bait to go searching for ambushes, in addition to the constant threat of mines and booby-traps.
> Bears repeating. This was true of a lot of "anti-communist" US actions: propping up a hated local elite who were in no way democratic.
Not wrong, but I'm curious to know how things worked out (so far?) over the long-term: a lot of non-communist dictatorial countries (that the US propped-up?) managed to move over onto more democratic systems eventually, whereas (AFAICT) communist governments have managed to hang on and are still single-party states.
The Commies are still around and one party though they've gotten more capitalist over the decades. I think the only ones left are China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam and I think Belarus(?).
Most(all?) of the anti-communist dictators/juntas are gone. Greece in the 70s, South Korea in the 80s. The last that I can think of were El Salvador and Guatamala in the 1990s.
Supporting hated dictators/rulers is still around, e.g. all the Gulf states.
Depends what you mean by "win". I suppose it implies "achieved some defined geopolitical goals". Those wars, perhaps, didn't have defined goals -- so what does "win" mean in the context of not having a win condition?
I am not deeply read on this subject, but the loss of President Diem profoundly impacted South Vietnam in an adverse manner for the U.S. efforts to maintain the country.
There was also great turmoil in the U.S. at the time (as we remember with the approaching DNC convention in Chicago). Nixon implemented an effort to distance the U.S. from the situation.
Rather like Afghanistan, you can prop up a government that has no real legitimacy outside the capital for as long as you're prepared to pay for it, but then it collapses.
I do not fully understand the backstory, but the Vienamese seem to have done OK out of the "Communist" victory. It's a very different place from North Korea.
Alternate counterfactual: is there a route through history where https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiphong_incident does not take place and a peaceful, unified Vietnam exists from the end of WW2 onwards?
>the Vienamese seem to have done OK out of the "Communist" victory
They have largely followed the Chinese model of economic development, via a policy of Đổi Mới[0][1] adopted in 1986 and has since continued with various reforms in the 1990s as well. This is persistent today in how Vietnamese economic policy is driven, as far as I can tell
It’s important to remember that the war in Vietnam had begun as a war of independence from the French. The US should never have gotten involved, and only did so because of the fear of the spread of Communism. We should never have gotten involved.
Yeah, the typical US Citizen completely forgets the French part of Vietnamese history. The US was like the French's big and tough friend, that got dragged into it.
Really, the US is all about the under dog fighting for independence, isn't that the US Mythos? We should have been rooting for the Vietnamese, not bombing them.
Something that strikes me as really ironic is that, here we are in 2024 and tons of goods are being manufactured in Vietnam for a pittance and exported to the west. We are effectively just a small step above having enslaved this country, without a single boot on the ground.
This is an interesting comment because it's stated with an air of confidence but interpreting statements like "got Vietnam, Iraq, and Ukraine right" this way (i.e. got everything else wrong or there were no other tests) would really distort someone's perception of reality.
Allegedly canadian intelligence knew this, but had it all marked "for canadian eyes only" because they were worried about consequences if usa found out they weren't on board. I highly doubt canada has super-spies, the problem is usa really wanted there to be WMDs, so they came to the conclusion there was.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canadian-intelligence-asses...