Most people know, at this point, that we went to Iraq based on public information that was profoundly wrong -- some almost certainly intentionally so. What isn't as well known is that the problems of intelligence, analysis, governance, and management that got us in continue to plague current US efforts. In a post that absolutely reflects my experience as an intelligence officer with DoD, working on (and in) Iraq, former CIA officer and counter-terrorism expert Larry Johnson reports this anecdote:
A old friend of my just deployed to Iraq. His unit will be carrying out a mission that involves psychological operations. Guess how many Arabic speakers are in the unit? None. Guess how many weeks of training they received on Iraq, Islam, and Arabic cultural sensitivities? NONE!! But we want these soldiers to go into a foreign combat theater and help shape the hearts and minds of a foreign people. This, in a nutshell, highlights why we are making so little progress in Iraq.For all the talk by some about how Iraq is so central to our national security, they sure seem weirdly uninterested in allocating the proper resources, training, and strategy to help make things better. This, incidentally, is one of the main points of my book, Still Broken, which comes out in just over a month; more on that in the coming weeks.
