We're currently hosting our discussions at Café Walnut, near the corner of 7th & Walnut in Olde City, just across the street from Washington Square Park. The cafe's entrance is below street level down some stairs, which can be confusing if it's your first time. Our group meets in the large room upstairs.
Since we're using the cafe's space, they ask that each person attending the meetup at least purchase a drink or snack. Please don't bring any food or drinks from outside. If you're hungry enough to eat a meal, they have more substantial fare such as salads, soups & sandwiches which are pretty good and their prices are reasonable.
The cafe is fairly easy to get to if you're using public transit. With SEPTA, take the Market-Frankford Line & get off at the 5th Street Station (corner of 5th & Market), and walk 2 blocks south on 5th and then turn right on Walnut Street and walk 2 blocks west. With PATCO, just get off at the 9th-10th & Locust stop and walk 3 blocks east & 1 block north. For those who are driving, parking in the neighborhood can be tough to find. If you can't find a spot on the street, I'd suggest parking in the Washington Square parking deck at 249 S 6th Street which is just a half block away.
INTELLIGENCE FAILURES, BAD POLICIES & CONSPIRACY THEORIES:
EVALUATING THE COMPETING EXPLANATIONS FOR U.S. FOREIGN POLICY DEBACLES IN THE MIDDLE EAST
INTRODUCTION:
The skeptic community often takes a "generalist" approach to debunking conspiracy theories, i.e. they look for general rules that govern their plausibility, such as the Bayesian interpretation of "Hanlon's Razor". For those who don't remember, Hanlon's Razor is a special version of Occam's Razor which states that it's more parsimonious to "never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity [or incompetence]". This principle doesn't preclude the possibility of conspiracies, but it leads one to assume that bad outcomes in both domestic & foreign policy are more likely to be accidents rather than conspiracies. To those familiar with military parlance, Hanlon's Razor ties in with beliefs about "Murphy's law" and the "fog of war" as the causes of failure in military operations.
This discussion will look at the notion of "intelligence failures" in what's known as the "intelligence cycle" — the process by which government agencies tasked with monitoring foreign actors collect, analyze, process, and disseminate critical information. See the Wikipedia entry on intelligence failure for a basic overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_in_the_intelligence_cycle
Intelligence agencies cannot typically authorize military actions independently, so this opens up the possibility for "policy failures" when they give the President & his national security advisors accurate information but the administration makes the wrong decision.
The idea that bad outcomes in foreign policy generally stem from "intelligence failures" and "policy failures" conflicts with the idea — prevalent among conspiracy theorists — that the U.S. government is far too powerful, well-informed & well-organized to suffer from these types of problems. Conspiracy theorists typically believe that many of the terror attacks, military coups & popular uprisings we see on the news were actually engineered by the CIA or other intelligence agencies, the at the behest of the military-industrial complex & policy elites (sometimes collectively referred to as the "deep state") who have a hidden agenda.
Conspiracy theories about attacks on the US typically come in 3 varieties: (1) belief that the US orchestrated a "false flag" attack on itself to justify retaliation, and (2) belief that the US allowed an enemy attack on "cannon fodder" to justify retaliation, (3) belief that the US created a "hoax" - i.e. falsely reported an attack that never occurred - to justify retaliation. In the context of the 9/11 attacks, the first 2 types of conspiracy theories are known as the "MIHOP" (Made It Happen On Purpose) and "LIHOP" (Let It Happen On Purpose) theories.
However, some of the LIHOP conspiracy theories for 9/11 are on their face slightly more plausible, and believers in all 3 types of conspiracy theories for other major attacks & threats to the US can muster some circumstantial evidence.
There's credible evidence that points to "neoimperialist" goals in certain US policy circles & a willingness to deceive the public. For example, proponents can point to policy papers in the public domain that support their claims of an only semi-secret plan to overthrow hostile regimes & establish U.S. hegemony in the Middle East. The classic example is the report published in 2000 by a neoconservative think tank, Project for a New American Century (PNAC), that presciently noted that the process of expanding America's military "is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century#Rebuilding_America's_Defenses_2
Another oft-cited proof of elaborate neocon plans for the Middle East comes from retired General Wesley Clark, who claimed in 2007 that during a visit to the Pentagon in the autumn of 2001 shortly after 9/11, an unnamed senior general told him that the Bush administration had a confidential paper proposing a series of regime change operations over 5 years in 7 countries: Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya, Sudan, Iran & Yemen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wesley_Clark#Post-2004_campaign
During Barack Obama's presidency, his deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes continually complained about the intrasigence of foreign policy advisors in DC think tanks, who he referred to collectively as "the Blob". Ben Rhodes' contrarian views caused quite stir when he was interviewed by David Semuels for a NY Times magazine profile, and he laid out all the tricks Obama administration had to play to get the Iran nuclear deal passed over the objections from DC foreign policy hawks who were hell-bent on confrontation with Tehran. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Rhodes_(White_House_staffer)#Controversies
Since Trump's election, many of his supporters with isolationist or "America First" views on foreign policy have worried that if he tries to deviate too much from the interventionism that characterizes the bipartisan foreign policy consensus of the "deep state" (their somewhat analogous term for Rhodes' "Blob"), he'll be framed for something to justify his impeachment. This has come to a head recently with both Democrats & many Republicans in the House voting 354 to 60 to condemn Trump's withdrawal of US troops from Kurdish strongholds in northeastern Syria.
In this meetup, we'll look at 4 common examples of what mainstream scholars describe as failures of U.S. intelligence and/or poor decision-making: (1) the 9/11 attacks, (2) the 2003 Iraq invasion, (3) the Libyan Civil War, and (4) the Syrian Civil War. We'll contrast the "intelligence failure" & "policy failure" explanations of these events with counter-arguments that these events were in fact the intentional result of the U.S. deep state attempting to dominate the Middle East by deposing hostile regimes, establishing puppet states & controlling the flow of oil & other strategic resources.
