When Iraqi's Don't Count

Sunni and Shiite Insurgents Remain Mystery to U.S., Iraq Report Charges

on one day in July, American officials in Iraq reported 93 attacks or significant acts of violence, but the study group's review found that 1,100 violent acts actually occurred that day. "The standard for recording attacks acts as a filter to keep events out of reports and databases," the report said.

For example, the report said that a killing of an Iraqi might not be counted by American officials as an attack, and that sectarian violence was not included in American databases if the source of the attack could not be determined. In addition, it said, "a roadside bomb or a rocket

By JAMES RISEN

Published: December 11, 2006

The U.S. still does not understand the enemy that American troops are fighting, according to the Iraq Study Group's report.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 10 — Nearly four years after the invasion of Iraq, the United States still does not understand the enemy that American troops are fighting, according to last week's report by the Iraq Study Group.

The commission's final report harshly criticized United States intelligence officials for failing to answer basic questions about the nature of the Sunni insurgency or the increasingly powerful Shiite militias, both of which pose grave threats to American forces.

The intelligence community has had some success hunting Al Qaeda in Iraq, the report found, but that terrorist organization is small and is not the main enemy confronting American troops. The far bigger Sunni insurgency and Shiite militias are still largely mysteries to American intelligence, according to the report.

"While the United States has been able to acquire good and sometimes superb tactical intelligence on Al Qaeda in Iraq, our government still does not understand very well either the insurgency in Iraq or the role of the militias," the report said. It said that American intelligence agencies were "not doing enough to map the insurgency, dissect it, and understand it on a national and provincial level" and that intelligence analysts' "knowledge of the organization, leadership, financing, and operations of militias, as well as their relationship to government security forces, also falls far short of what policy makers need to know."

The study group's findings echo complaints quietly voiced in recent months by a number of current and former American officials, who have warned of the failure by American intelligence officers in Iraq to adequately penetrate the Sunni insurgency. These officials say the level of violence in Baghdad makes it extremely difficult for American intelligence officers to move around the country to gather information, and as a result they rely far too heavily on Iraqis who come to them in the Green Zone or to other major American bases, and on information from the intelligence service of the new Iraqi government.

That leaves the Central Intelligence Agency and American military intelligence vulnerable to manipulation by Iraqis who feed the Americans disinformation because they have an ax to grind or simply as a way to make money by selling information to the United States.

The report quoted an unidentified United States intelligence analyst who told the Iraq Study Group that "we rely too much on others to bring information to us" and "do not understand the context of what we are told."

Bureaucratic obstacles in the American government and a failure by the Bush administration to make the issue a top priority have left the United States with gaping holes in its understanding of the insurgency, the report found.

For example, the report found that the Defense Intelligence Agency rotates its analysts from one posting to another so frequently that few develop any real depth of understanding of the insurgency. "We were told that there are fewer than 10 analysts on the job at the Defense Intelligence Agency who have more than two years' experience in analyzing the insurgency," the report said. "Capable analysts are rotated to new assignments, and on-the-job training begins anew. Agencies must have a better personnel system to keep analytic expertise focused on the insurgency."

An agency spokesman disputed the numbers used by the report and said that the agency had "hundreds of analysts focused on the Iraq situation," adding that a "considerable number of experienced analysts are forward deployed and are directly working the counterterrorism-insurgency issues."

Meanwhile, the Bush administration has not sought to significantly improve on-the-ground intelligence about the enemy, the report said. "The Defense Department and the intelligence community have not invested sufficient people and resources to understand the political and military threat to American men and women in the armed forces," the report said. "Congress has appropriated almost $2 billion this year for countermeasures to protect our troops in Iraq against improvised explosive devices, but the administration has not put forward a request to invest comparable resources in trying to understand the people who fabricate, plant and explode those devices."

The study group recommended that the director of national intelligence and the defense secretary "devote significantly greater analytic resources to the task of understanding the threats and sources of violence in Iraq."

At the same time, the study group found that United States officials had underreported the level of violence in Iraq, providing misleading information to American leaders and the public about the scale of the problem facing American troops.

The study group determined that on one day in July, American officials in Iraq reported 93 attacks or significant acts of violence, but the study group's review found that 1,100 violent acts actually occurred that day. "The standard for recording attacks acts as a filter to keep events out of reports and databases," the report said.

For example, the report said that a killing of an Iraqi might not be counted by American officials as an attack, and that sectarian violence was not included in American databases if the source of the attack could not be determined. In addition, it said, "a roadside bomb or a rocket or mortar attack that doesn't hurt U.S. personnel doesn't count."

"Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals," the report stated.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/11/world/middleeast/11intel.html?ex=157680000&en=ac0e4fb38796c6e8&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod

The Wrong Questions

Quizzing Robert Gates - New York Times:

“Robert M. Gates, President Bush’s nominee to succeed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, will appear before the Senate Armed Services Committee tomorrow for his confirmation hearing. We asked six defense and foreign-policy experts to tell us what questions the senators should ask.”

In Ursula K. LeGuin's novel ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’ a religious group, the Handara had a sying that has stuck with me over the decades, “There is nothing as perfectly useless as the right answer to the wrong question.” As far as I'm concerned, the entire Iraq debacle is the result of asking the wrong questions and often failing to accept the answers to them. Especially, if they conflict with an unquestioned ideology.

Here are their categories:
The Next Attack
Rights vs. Realism
Life With the Chiefs
You and Tehran
An Anti-Rumsfeld

Here are mine:
War on a tactic
Facts and fictions
How to take the hill, or which hill to take
Affected Parties
At what point do you resign

We aren't even asking the right categories of questions.

Lives, American, Iraqi, Coalition are at stake.

We could benefit from looking in a mirror

“ What I thought was the greatest expression of the American character in my lifetime occurred in the immediate aftermath of those catastrophic attacks. The country came together in the kind of resolute unity that I imagined was similar to the feeling most Americans felt after Pearl Harbor. We soon knew who the enemy was, and there was remarkable agreement on what needed to be done. Americans were united and the world was with us.

For a brief moment.

The invasion of Iraq marked the beginning of the change in the American character. During the Cuban missile crisis, when the hawks were hot for bombing — or an invasion — Robert Kennedy counseled against a U.S. first strike. That’s not something the U.S. would do, he said.

Fast-forward 40 years or so and not only does the U.S. launch an unprovoked invasion and occupation of a small nation — Iraq — but it does so in response to an attack inside the U.S. that the small nation had nothing to do with.

Who are we?

Another example: There was a time, I thought, when there was general agreement among Americans that torture was beyond the pale. But when people are frightened enough, nothing is beyond the pale. And we’re in an era in which the highest leaders in the land stoke — rather than attempt to allay — the fears of ordinary citizens. Islamic terrorists are equated with Nazi Germany. We’re told that we’re in a clash of civilizations.If, as President Bush says, we’re engaged in “the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century,” why isn’t the entire nation mobilizing to meet this dire threat?

Where are we?

The president put us on this path away from the better angels of our nature, and he has shown no inclination to turn back. Lately he has touted legislation to try terror suspects in a way that would make a mockery of the American ideals of justice and fairness. To get a sense of just how far out the administration’s approach has been, consider the comments of Brig. Gen. James Walker, the top uniformed lawyer for the Marines. Speaking at a Congressional hearing last week, he said no civilized country denies defendants the right to see the evidence against them. The United States, he said, “should not be the first.”

And Senator Lindsey Graham, a conservative South Carolina Republican who is a former military judge, said, “It would be unacceptable, legally, in my opinion, to give someone the death penalty in a trial where they never heard the evidence against them.”

How weird is it that this possibility could even be considered?

What have we done?

The character of the U.S. has changed. We’re in danger of being completely ruled by fear. Most Americans have not shared the burden of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Very few Americans are aware, as the Center for Constitutional Rights tells us, that of the hundreds of men held by the U.S. in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, many “have never been charged and will never be charged because there is no evidence justifying their detention.”

Even fewer care.

We could benefit from looking in a mirror, and absorbing the shock of not recognizing what we’ve become.

Knowing how we appear might, just might, allow us to see others as people too. For example, lately the media has been playing up the idea that the real problem in Iraq is the actions of Shiite militias. It's time to point out that the Shia have been murdered in wholesale lots but didn't start retaliating until last year. The Sunnis seem to have no problem killing men, women or children, but the Shia retaliation seems to be limited to grown men. That's somehow made them monsters responsible for all of Iraq's instability. Their actions are deplorable, but they don't exist in a vacuum, other than the absence of any sense that the coalition cared about their security, or their lives.

…We made the militias possible, and strengthened them.

Worse, we made them necessary.

For all our talk about democracy, when the majority won we insisted on a place for the losers who had refused to participate in the election. The losers who at that time and still are the primary threat to our men and women who serve.

Unfortunately, even then we were blaming Shiite Iran for the IEDs built from the ammo dumps and sites under UN seal that, unlike the Oil Ministry, we refused to guard after Saddam was toppled.

We broke Iraq, but we seem determined to make the regions Shia pay the price.…