LAST FRIDAY, as John Negroponte began his first dayas the nation's first ever Director of National Intelligence, Charles Duelfer spoke at the University's Miller Center on his experience as a weapons inspector in Iraq. Negroponte's position was created to address the intelligence failures over Sept. 11 and Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Duelfer suggested, however, that what is really wrong with our intelligence community is simply a failure to be more imaginative, open-minded and sensitive to the fact that foreigners do things in ways that are, well, foreign.
The old saying, "when in Rome, do as the Romans do," turns out to be just as true in Baghdad. Duelfer spent the better part of the 1990s in Iraq with the U.N. Special Commission on WMD. Last year, the CIA appointed him to investigate why Iraq turned out not to have its much-ballyhooed WMD. Based on his experience, Duelfer concluded that the Americans and the United Nations simply failed to understand the way in which Iraqis thought or did things.
For example, Iraqis would call many innocent substances "chemical munitions." They would store suspicious items that turned out not to be weapons in random places like schools. "Analytically, you just can't account for that," Duelfer said. For lack of a better description, he characterized many of these actions as just plain "weird."
On the other hand, much of the American way of thinking seemed weird to Iraqis as well. For example, Duelfer recounted how an Iraqi official asked him why the American military was constantly blowing up buildings believed to contain munitions. "We're Americans, that's just what we do," was what came to Duelfer's mind. But as things turned out, the Iraqis simply did not store their weapons in buildings. It was as plain as that.
Of course, hindsight is always 20/20. Had Duelfer been asked to make contemporaneous judgments about the intelligence before the war in Iraq, he likely would not have done much better. As he pointed out, American troops geared up very heavily against WMD hazards. "It was a very real threat -- people were not making that up," he said.
However, it should come as no great surprise to Americans that we must expect the unexpected. After all, nobody expected the Japanese to use "kamikaze" suicide bombers during World War II. The Viet Cong's extensive underground tunnels were also a deadly novelty to Americans during the Vietnam War. Still, even after seeing such asymmetrical warfare techniques, and after Hollywood and novelists had impressed fantastical terrorist scenarios on the public's imagination, the intelligence community still did not widely anticipate Sept. 11 hijackers using commercial airliners as missiles. And now it seems that even after the shock of Sept. 11, American analysts still did not realize that they had to abandon their assumptions based on what they were accustomed to. In the case of Iraq, they failed to account for the mindset of Iraqi officials, who, according to Duelfer, did not even have a command structure or decisionmaking process familiar to Americans.
All this is not to say that the war in Iraq was wrong. Iraq did possess and use WMD in its war with Iran, which Duelfer believes was the only way Iraq prevailed and Saddam was able to survive. Iraq's WMD program also deterred the United States from going beyond repelling Iraq from Kuwait and going directly to Baghdad during the 1991 Gulf War. Based on these successes, Duelfer asked, "Why wouldn't [Saddam] build this stuff? He'd be crazy not to."
While we may never know the answer to this question, we do know the intelligence community needs to place a greater emphasis on understanding the cultures and ways of thinking of foreign governments. Rather than undertake a massive reorganization of our spy agencies, if Negroponte merely gives more prominence to the issues Duelfer highlighted, we may be on our way to real intelligence reform.
Eric Wang's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at ewang@cavalierdaily.com.
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