Prescience

In this week's New Yorker Seymour Hirsch has another first-rate article on the situation in the Middle East. I was taken aback when I read the following paragraphs:

The surprising strength of Hezbollah’s resistance, and its continuing ability to fire rockets into northern Israel in the face of the constant Israeli bombing, the Middle East expert told me, “is a massive setback for those in the White House who want to use force in Iran. And those who argue that the bombing will create internal dissent and revolt in Iran are also set back.”

Nonetheless, some officers serving with the Joint Chiefs of Staff remain deeply concerned that the Administration will have a far more positive assessment of the air campaign than they should, the former senior intelligence official said. “There is no way that Rumsfeld and Cheney will draw the right conclusion about this,” he said. “When the smoke clears, they’ll say it was a success, and they’ll draw reinforcement for their plan to attack Iran.”

And this prediction, that irrespective of the facts on the ground the Bush people would claim victory, has proven eerily prescient.

This is just a tough case to buy. Olmert too has argued that this was a victory for Israel, but almost no one in Israel is buying it, nor should they be. This post facto rationalization is nothing more than whistling padt the graveyard. Israel's plan was not to engage in air attacks long enough for a multimational peace keeping force to step in. Israel's plan was not for the UN Security Council to be the deciding factor in this war. Israel's desire was for nothing less than the debilitation at minimum and even moreso the destruction of Hezbollah. This shows yet another example of the Bush administration seeing what it wants to see rather than what is out there.

Another disquieting excerpt from the piece tells us the following:

The Pentagon consultant told me that intelligence about Hezbollah and Iran is being mishandled by the White House the same way intelligence had been when, in 2002 and early 2003, the Administration was making the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. “The big complaint now in the intelligence community is that all of the important stuff is being sent directly to the top—at the insistence of the White House—and not being analyzed at all, or scarcely,” he said. “It’s an awful policy and violates all of the N.S.A.’s strictures, and if you complain about it you’re out,” he said. “Cheney had a strong hand in this.”

Intelligence failures helped lead to 9/11. Intelligence failures helped determine the flawed way in which we went to war in Iraq. And now, if Hersch's source(s) can be believed, it seems that members of the administration feel better qualified to guage intelligence matters than the intelligence apparati. This is alarming as a short-term approach and is unacceptable as a long-term plan for addressing terrorism or foreign affairs. Intelligence is too important for this kind of politicization. I want to be optimistic about our long-range plan for the Middle East, but the more I see the more I genuinely worry that the administration only cares about surviving to January 2009, scoring its political points, and settling scores where it can.