Intelligence Summit Notes and Impressions - Part II of...

Thanks to loyal readers for their patience while our notes from the Intelligence Summit sat at the bottom of a ski gear bag while we occupied ourselves with more pleasant thoughts and activities last week. As a friend noted recently: "pretty ironic that we may be at the beginning of Armageddon or at least Armageddon Lite, and... you were off skiing." Indeed.

This post continues an abortive start we made on the 18th with too little time and insufficient perspective. Rather than imposing a grand structure on this, we'll mix in impressions with notes and skip around a bit. Stay with us. There's lots to process.

We’ll quote only where we’re certain of what we heard. Elsewhere we are paraphrasing or editorializing. One side effect of this adventure is a heightened respect for the reportorial profession. The MSM may be desperately biased much of the time but the job of a beat reporter isn’t as easy as it looks.

Entering the Hyatt in Crystal City, VA early Saturday morning (February 18th), we were immediately struck by the visibility of security. Dogs in the upper lobby. Dogs in the lower lobby. Burly, determined-looking men in black flak vests and helmets toting automatic weapons. Men (and it was exclusively men as far as we could tell) wearing earpieces - eyes darting, watching everyone and everything - before we even exited the escalator.

This was like no other conference we'd ever attended. That said, we immediately noted holes in this facade that a determined adversary could have easily driven through - literally or figuratively. This was not El Al at Tel Aviv. Much of it - unfortunately - would be better characterized as "security theatre": tight for a conference on industrial fasteners but ridiculously loose given the individuals in attendence and the subjects being discussed. We'll stop there lest the bad guys be reading.

One of the most remarkable speakers was Richard Perle who gave one of several keynotes. He spoke just before lunch on Saturday. His calm, thoughtful, demeanor and deeply rational intelligence were captivating. The term "velvet bulldozer" came to mind. That's the nickname someone gave to a particularly competent and caring hospice nurse who cared for KM's brother in his final days. Anyone seeking to do intellectual battle with this man in person would find themselves nodding in agreement and liking him - even if he had come into the discussion determined to disagree.

We came in a few minutes late as Perle was setting the stage for discussion of the Middle East, talking about intelligence failures during the Cold War and the multi-decade grip that massively flawed frameworks of assumptions can have on foreign policy. Net/net: we underestimated the extent of Soviet military programs (in spending terms) while simultaneously overestimating their economic growth. Together, those assumptions led us to a sense of inevitability: a conclusion that detente was the only answer. Until Reagan, of course - a fact he didn't need to mention specifically to this highly sympathetic audience.

Perle went on to talk about how the CIA has been openly "at war" with the Bush administration since the latter's election to office, engaging he noted (by way of illustration) in a campaign of villification against Ahmed Chalabi. The red meat only got redder, even as Perle never raised his voice or changed his steady, confident pace. The true nature of militant Islam he said, is very poorly understood at the CIA, an agency deeply flawed he opined, by "an appalling lack of knowledge" and that "doesn't understand the big picture": about the Koran, about Arabic language, about the goals of our enemies, about what's at stake and about what sources we should be relying upon in the region.

In what could have been mistaken for the conventional critique of the State Department, Perle went on to criticize the CIA as having - counter to the popular Hollywood impression - a strongly "liberal orientation" without any sense of toughness, military common sense or street smarts, all burdened by the heavy weight of bureaucratic agendas and foolishness that can plague any large, poorly accountable organization.

He related the horrifying story (timeframe unclear but the impression was that it was in the past decade) of a CIA manager who wanted to increase the volume of reporting out of Iran. And he got exactly what he wished for... through the "same bandwidth channel". Lots more reporting... until the mullahs figured out that nobody could possibly be writing that many legitimate letters to their uncle Henry in Des Moines... at which point the entire U.S. intelligence network in Iran was rolled up and summarily executed. Oops.

Perle noted Saudi Wahabbist financing of mosques in Bosnia - an area that "had been multi-ethnic and tolerant before", using that fact to segue into speculation on how the Saudis might react as Iran flexes its increasingly large nuclear and political muscle in the region. "I hope we will prevent" Iran from getting nukes, he remarked. He doesn't believe that diplomacy will work. (No surprise there.) Perle expressed confidence that a limited strike could "destroy" the Iranian nuclear program. (Other commentators and analysts, including yours truly, are not so confident that 'destroy' is the proper word. Set back? Probably. Destroy? No.)

And in a stunning insight of what should be more obvious, Perle noted that discussions about the military options for Iran by the MSM tend to be anti-pre-emption on the theory that we don't know where all of the nuclear facilities are... which gives the lie to any argument for diplomacy. After all, if the West, the U.S., the UN (or anyone else on our side) doesn't know where all of the nuclear facilities are (and the Iranians sure aren't saying), then how can we know to negotiate about them? One either assumes that there are unknown facilities, or one assumes that there are not.

If there are unknown facilities, then neither attack nor diplomacy could be assured of stopping the program (though there remains a strong argument for slowing it down). And if there aren't, then either option could work - in theory at least. It's a true Kobayashi Maru dilemma - a no-win situation.

Yet this apparent logical deadlock serves to turn attention back to intent. (Where have we heard this before?) I.e., since we cannot know whether there are hidden facilities or not (and for the record we believe, given the stakes, that it's prudent to assume that there are), then the individuals in positions of leadership, what they are saying they will do, and what they have done in the past matter a lot. In fact, those become the only things that matter. In other words, it's not the gun but the madman waving what looks like a gun that matters.

Suspending disbelief, assuming benign motives and/or assuming that the large pointy black object being pointed at one's face is really a plastic water-toy are not realistic options when one's life is on the line... something that all cops know. The same logic applies here.

That's about half our notes on the Perle talk but we have work to do. Watch this space for more.