The amazing disappearing NIE

The Iraq NIE released on Friday has gotten less attention than I expected. That is partially due to this administration's time-honored tradition of releasing bad news on a Friday (nobody pays attention to Saturday news), and this was the Friday before the Super Bowl, a veritable perfect storm if you want bad news to be overlooked. Still, the document is worth unpacking.

To start, a draft of any NIE is written and slowly makes its way up through the intel chain of command. I would guess that this one originated within CIA, but there’s no hard and fast rule for where an NIE begins. Once there’s a draft to work with, the other agencies weigh in, with CIA, DIA, and (State’s) INR being the major players, along with DNI and NIC (National Intelligence Council) personnel coordinating all the input. I’ve participated in NIC meetings on major analytic issues like this, and sometimes they go smoothly and sometimes they can be an absolute foodfight. I would imagine this was relatively straightforward, though, only because virtually everybody in the intelligence community knows Iraq is a disaster (and have for some time now).

The document's explanation of language is helpful, and intel-speak does need some translation. It’s a very specific style, designed to indicate judgment through degrees of likelihood. In writing intel papers, you always have to differentiate facts (of which there are few, because intel reports are almost never 100% sure) from assessment (which is most of the work), hence the frequent “we judge”, “we estimate”, etc. The assessments are based on a combination of estimated source/information veracity, volume of information, and contextual knowledge.

The 3.5 pages of unclassified key judgments are likely (see, old habits die hard) just a fraction of the full document, and I would guess the unclassified judgments are both more muted and less predictive than the complete report. The findings are, frankly, stark. There’s little that the reality-based community will find surprising, but much of the NIE directly contradicts what the Bush administration has been saying for years.

The initial, overall assessment basically says that Iraq is likely to deteriorate at a rate consistent with the "latter part" of 2006 in the absence of a major shift in the political/military situation. That is, Iraq is likely to continue to deteriorate rapidly over the next 12-18 months. It also acknowledges the reasons for sectarian divisions (essentially profound mutual distrust from decades of the old power structure), the decentralized authority within the major groups (which makes a political situation difficult), and the "self-sustaining" accelerators of violence.

In stating "the term 'civil war' does not adequately capture the complexity of the conflict in Iraq," the NIE essentially admits that the situation is worse than a classical civil war. We can’t just wait (or hope) for one side to win; there are multiple levels of conflict (with the caveat that our presence is probably accelerating more than inhibiting two or three of those) and each plays a part in the cycle of violence. "Civil war" does describe, as the NIE says, key elements of the violence, however, which gives the lie to Bush administration claims otherwise.

After a wish list of (unlikely) potential factors that could benefit the situation and a gratuitous slap at the Maliki government, the NIE very clearly states that the neocons (and Cheney's people) remain absolutely full of it: "Iraq’s neighbors influence, and are influenced by, events within Iraq, but the involvement of these outside actors is not likely to be a major driver of violence or the prospects for stability . . ." This is a clear repudiation of the idea that the conflict is driven by Iran, al-Qaeda elements, Syria, or other regional actors, and those who insist on hyperventilating about Iran in particular should take note.

The paper closes with potential outcomes (again, National Intelligence Estimates usually project out 12-18 months, so these are possibilities for that timeframe). First is "chaos leading to partition," which I think is very unlikely in the near term. A weak central government will likely continue to cede power to localities, but there is little reason to believe that power will be a tripartite consolidation as the paper posits. Much more likely than "three mutually antagonistic parts" is warlordism, or localism, for lack of a better word, which the paper describes as "anarchic fragmentation of power", its third possibility. I see no reason to believe government will be any more effective at the super-province level than the national level (with the notable exception of Kurdistan, which already has a functioning -- if brutal and somewhat authoritarian -- regime), and such fragmentation is not only likely, but largely extant. The third option listed is a "Shia strong-man", which I think is entirely possible, especially after U.S. withdrawal. The Shia will want to consolidate, and if they can get their fighters to unite in a marriage of convenience at minimum -- a big if, admittedly -- either a single Shia leader or small Shia oligarchy could emerge. None of these possibilities, however, would replace the violence, but rather exist in the midst of some level of it.

The NIE lays out what many of us have been saying for years. It is a direct rebuke of administration statements and policies, and like virtually everything that disagrees with the administration, it is already, just days after being released, settling into the dustbin of history.