Truman Project Fellow Gail Harris expressed her opinion on the President's foreign policy statement at West Point and his recent statement concerning the crisis in Iraq. She questioned the President's actions on the role of the military in Iraq. Also, she wrote in disagreement about a recent article titled “Jihadist Gains in Iraq Blindside American Spies.”
I’ve been off the blogosphere for the last few weeks, primarily because my condo complex is undergoing a massive renovation and it’s hard to think when people are jack hammering outside your door. But it’s the weekend, so the workers are not present, and the Iraq crisis has gotten my juices flowing. I intend to cover two topics in this blog: my thoughts on the president’s recent foreign policy statements and on a couple of points I think Shane Harris (no relation) got wrong in an article he wrote for Foreign Policy, “Jihadist Gains in Iraq Blindside American Spies.”
First, the Foreign Policy article. I’m a big fan of Harris’ writing and thought overall it was an informative, well-written piece. I have a problem with just one paragraph:
“The intelligence agencies’ inability to predict the latest crisis in Iraq is likely to fuel critics of the Obama administration’s management of other global crises, including in Syria and Ukraine. In the case of Russia’s seizure of Crimea, in which U.S. spies were also caught by surprise, sophisticated electronic eavesdropping systems run by the National Security Agency were of little use because Russian forces limited their time on telephones and adopted the techniques of jihadists, sending couriers back and forth between their units.”
Intelligence analysts write a large number of reports, similar to the stories seen in the mainstream media on a daily basis. The majority of these reports are classified, so the media would not have access to that information. Therefore, you cannot possibly know for sure what they have or have not been saying in those reports.
As for the “sources” reporters are so found of quoting, due to the shear volume of reports produced, I doubt that they have gone through all available reports either. Whenever I had to brief “higher ups” on hot topics, I always had to include background information on the subject at hand to bring them up to speed. Those individuals usually have a huge number of issues on their plate at any one time. I never ran into a senior decision maker who had the time to comb through the huge amount of reports made available daily by the intelligence community. They rely on their intelligence staff to keep track of the information and notify them of the critical information as needed. Additionally, on major staffs you get an opportunity several times a week during staff meetings to update them on what you think the important issues are and what may come and bite them at some point.
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