Obama, McCain, and the World of Intelligence. I recently reported a couple pieces on the presidential candidates' intelligence policies and advisory brain trusts (McCain, Obama). But for various reasons, some my own doing, some not (and I reiterate my extreme annoyance at cutesy and misleading headlines), the Obama piece bugs me. In any case, a thoughtful critique from a former US intelligence officer, less of the piece than the larger issues and players involved, gave me a chance to clarify the issues a bit better. The gist of the commenter's observation (which I edited down a bit) is that Obama's intel people are more technocratic than break-the-mould reformers (my preference, by the way, would have been to call the piece "Obama's Intelcrats"), while McCain's people and orientation speak to the desire to resurrect a kind of nostalgic fantasy of a World War II era service that is in reality inappropriate for today's needs, and in that fantastical way, portending of more policy disasters:

I don't want to sound critical but I do wonder why nobody is pointing out the hollowness of this candidate's claims that he is a force for change. McLaughlin was Tenet's deputy and a principal architect of the mishandling of the analysis on Iraq. As acting DCI when the current intel laws were being updated he did nothing to inform the debate. ... John Brennan was a young DI analyst who hitched himself to Tenet as special assistant and then counsel. .... These guys are hardly voices for change. ... Where among the Obama advisers are the people who have tried to fix anything? .... Sorry but I'm not buying or drinking this koolaid.

The other guy is just a disaster. Even if Mike Kostiw is a great guy, so what? ... He sat with Goss and that group for years and was not able to influence that whole disaster. He says the McCain wants an OSS type organization. Say again? Why? The OSS was a wartime specific response to a specific problem. It was never intended to be a model for a civilian intelligence agency and none of the leaders tried to keep that model at the end of the war. What are these guys talking about? The fact is McCain will just drag back all the old neoconservative hacks who have already caused so many stupid mistakes and initiated so many fallacious policies.

Over at Commentary, Shmuel Rosner draws contrasts from my pieces as well about what the two candidates would do in the world of intelligence. My argument with Rosner's take as we discussed in an email exchange is that essentially both the Obama and McCain camps agree that the intelligence community is a mess, and that more and better human and actionable intelligence and a more competent intelligence community are needed. There's no argument there. But there is. Because at its essence, when the Obama people talk about fixing intelligence, they mean how to fix the intelligence community so that it can provide the president more accurate intelligence. When the McCain people talk about fixing intelligence, they mean how to get what they see as a clique of recalcitrant intelligence bureaucrats to provide the president more of the intelligence he wants to support their preferred policy options. And if the Pentagon can provide more of what the president wants better than the CIA, the McCain circle thinking goes, so be it, and if with more special ops and special effects, even better. (This is essentially Rosner's take: "the Pentagon gets the job done." Well, check out how well the Pentagon got things done when it secretly sent emissaries to meet with the CIA blacklisted Iranian fabricator Ghorbanifar for a case study in who you don't want guiding your next fantasy Iran coup. And as much as they insist that that's some outlier and not the model, it's hard not to detect from conversations with people in the McCain national security camp that those meetings were a test case in what happens when people who think the Pentagon or just whoever can just go out and do intelligence operations and collection from sources the CIA is too stubbornly risk-averse to work with -- voila - and how foolish that is. And the example is in fact not an outlier. What some of the McCain circle's sharpest CIA critics have long wanted is a CIA willing to tell the president that it would be feasable to mount an Iran regime change plan based on aggressive covert support to the Iranian opposition. The same way they wanted the CIA to tell the president that it would be feasable to overturn the regime of Saddam Hussein by aggressively supporting the Iraqi opposition, who would do it themselves. We saw how that turned out.)

The problem is, as the last eight years have shown, more accurate intelligence from a more competent intelligence community is not necessarily the same thing as "the intelligence the president wants" to support his preferred policy option, depending on who the president is. In other words, "fixing the intelligence comunity" and "intel reform" are in some ways proxy issues for the real issue. The real tension is less about quality of intelligence at all, even though that is a real issue and what everyone talks about, but about what the president wants to do with better intelligence. And here, I think the observation is generally correct that McCain's people reflect the impulse to try to strip the intelligence community of its sense of independence and turn it into a more military style organization answering to a commander in chief in order to more readily elevate intelligence to justify and support military and paramilitary interventions, while Obama and his advisors are inclined to see a more complex world that warrants greater caution and a higher threshold for the use of force. Which is perhaps one of the sharpest contrasts between the two candidacies, and one which voters seem to understand.

Posted by Laura at September 27, 2008 12:42 PM