INTELLIGENCE FAILURES, BAD POLICIES & CONSPIRACY THEORIES:
EVALUATING THE COMPETING EXPLANATIONS FOR U.S. FOREIGN POLICY DEBACLES IN THE MIDDLE EAST
INTRODUCTION:
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.
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.
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 of DC foreign policy hawks who were bent on confrontation with Tehran. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Rhodes_(White_House_staffer)#Controversies
After 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 would be framed for something to justify his impeachment. This conspiratorial view was encouraged when Defense Secretary Jim Mattis resigned in Dec. 2018 over Trump's plans to withdraw US troops from Kurdish strongholds in northern Syria, as well as when both Democrats & many Republicans in the House voting 354 to 60 to condemn Trump's withdrawal in Oct. 2019, and this was going on amid the efforts to impeach Trump (albeit for other reasons). Similarly, when Trump announced his intentions to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan in 2020, many of his supporters perceived the sudden breaking of the NY Times story about "Russian bounties" on U.S. troops as a covert attempt to sabotage his negotiations with the Taliban. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American-led_intervention_in_the_Syrian_civil_war#2019_drawdown_of_U.S._ground_forces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_bounty_program#Trump_administration
The decision to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan in 2021 was one of the few issues where Joe Biden agreed with Trump. As we discussed in our last meetup, some political commentators like Glenn Greenwald are now predicting that Biden's bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan has earned him the ire of the national security establishment and their lackeys in the national press corps who cover foreign policy. Only time will tell if this is true...
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 US intervention in the Libyan Civil War, and (4) the US intervention in the Syrian Civil War & the rise of ISIS. 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.
RELATED MATERIAL FROM PAST MEETUPS:
We covered the influence of the "neoconservatives" and the "Israel lobby" on U.S. foreign policy in a meetup back in June of 2019 entitled "Neoliberals, Neocons, and NWO 2.0". The group of conservative intellectuals known as the "neocons" certainly had a lot of influence during the Bush administration and enthusiastically backed the 2003 Iraq invasion, as did the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, but as we discussed there were also a significant amount of support for the war among Democrats & U.S. foreign policy didn't change drastically under Obama, suggesting there's a much broader & bipartisan foreign policy consensus at work. Similarly, while Israel certainly has a strong lobby in the U.S. and plays a key role in helping shape U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, other allies like Saudi Arabia & Turkey play a major role, and the lobbies of the oil & defense industries do as well. Those who see U.S. foreign policy as a product of a Zionist conspiracy have to ignored a lot of other influences to maintain that belief. See Parts 3 & 4 of my discussion outline: https://www.meetup.com/Philly-Skeptics/events/nfbkqqyzhbjc/
We had a meetup back in Nov. 2019 entitled "Has Israel Conspired Against the U.S.?" and in Part 3 we discussed the mystery of the "dancing Israelis" - Israeli nationals who allegedly worked for a moving company who were seen celebrating as the Twin Towers fell and were later detained & questioned by police. We also discussed the mystery of the Israeli "art students" and the suspicions about them working as spies. These concerns into some conspiracy theories about Israel masterminding the 9/11 attacks as a "false flag" to get the U.S. to commit to fighting in the Middle East. Even apart from the difficult logistics of coordinating the 9/11 attacks in secret and then fooling U.S. intelligence agencies as to the true perpetrators, these conspiracy theories fail to explain why Israel would want the U.S. to invade Afghanistan in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Instead, Israel would've presumably tried to pin the attacks on Iran, since by the late 1990s the Iranians were Israel's top concern as they sponsored Hezbollah in Lebanon. https://www.meetup.com/Philly-Skeptics/events/rgrhxqyzpbwb/
Back on Sept. 5th, we had a discussion entitled "Myths, Misconceptions & Conspiracy Theories about Afghanistan". In Part 2, we discussed the U.S. funding & training of the Mujahideen in the Afghan-Soviet War and the allegations that this led to the rise of the Taliban. We also covered concerns about the CIA operating in cahoots with Afghan opium traffickers. In Part 3, we discussed various conspiracy theories about the hunt for Osama bin Laden and the raid that killed him in 2011. In Part 4, we discussed the NY Times article in June of 2020 that claimed there were "Russian bounties" on U.S. troops in Afghanistan, as well as why that story began to look rather dubious by April of 2021. https://www.meetup.com/Philly-Skeptics/events/sxpscsyccmbhb/
