More Bad News

Apparenly Porter Goss' purge hasn't put a stop to CIA leaking. This should (but, obviously, won't) put an end to disingenuous theories that the CIA writes these reports in order to advance some kind of partisan agenda. George Bush will never be on the ballot again, and he won't be trying to get his successor elected for several more years now. Something written this month and leaked today to Doug Jehl will have no impact on any election. Rather, the CIA's people in Iraq wrote the report because they believe it to be accurate, and someone leaked it to The New York Times because they think the administration's statements on this (as on many others) matter are contrary to the facts.

Now it should be conceded as Eli Lake was arguing in comments here the other day that the CIA, like any other organization, has its set ways of doing things and looking at the world and that the worldview prevalent in the agency is simply at odds with that of the people who undertook this venture in the first place. As a result, it's not really surprising that the undertakers and the Agency should come to systematically different conclusions about what's going on in Iraq. The initial disagreement about the war stemmed from disagreements about how to think about Iraq, and the Middle East more generally, and these disagreements re-inscribe themselves as time passes and new stuff happens.

The bottom line, though, is that in just about every previous CIA-White House clash since 9/11, the CIA has ultimately been proven correct. As it's totally unclear to me at this point what US policy in Iraq actually is, it's a bit hard for me to tell whether or not I think we're succeeding at our goals. But assuming we have in mind something like reducing the level of violence in the country it's very hard to see how we're achieving anything of the sort.