HOME / war stories: Military analysis.

Intelligence FailureWinners and losers in the knock-down fight over Charles Freeman's aborted appointment.

By Fred KaplanPosted Wednesday, March 11, 2009, at 7:09 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

RSS

In the coming months, if he can be taken at his word, President Obama will open talks with Syria and invite Iran to join a regional conference on Afghanistan and Pakistan. China will have to play some part in this conference, too, as it will with forums on North Korea. And if any progress is made toward Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, he will have to pressure the Israelis to make compromises on policy toward Gaza and the settlements.

All of these things will be difficult enough. They will be harder still if domestic critics can scream that Obama's policy is being manipulated by "that Saudi agent" or "that Chinese apologist" who's running the intelligence community.

Or let's look at the present, not the future. On Tuesday, Adm. Blair testified that the Iranians have neither enriched their uranium to the point where it can be used as a weapon nor decided whether to enrich it any further—that is, whether to build nuclear weapons at all. Blair is respected in all quarters. Some senators may not have liked this assessment—it implies that the Iranian threat isn't so clear, much less urgent—but they had to treat it seriously, given the source. However, if Freeman were NIC director, Blair's words would have been received with cocked eyebrows and howls of protest over "the politicization of intelligence."

The accusations, now or in the future, would have been absurd. The chairman of the National Intelligence Council is not involved in making policy. Nor does he even have much impact on the contents of National Intelligence Estimates. Wayne White, a former State Department intelligence analyst who spent 26 years working in NIC sessions, told me in an e-mail today that the agency specialists—the National Intelligence Officers on specific regions or subjects—hammer out a consensus and write the resulting reports. The NIC chairmen coordinate these meetings, set the parameters of the discussion, pose questions about assumptions, and sometimes push the participants for more evidence—all of which can certainly affect an estimate—but rarely do they influence its conclusion. White and several other former officials who have known Freeman for many years say that he would have been an excellent chairman and that, though he certainly holds views, he would never have let them get in the way of hard analysis.

But, again, this is irrelevant. Intelligence has to be credible as well as correct, and it's credible only if it appears to be objective. Its politicization during the Bush-Cheney era only sharpens this point—and heightens President Obama's sensitivity to its dictates.

If Obama wants to change foreign policy in controversial ways, intelligence will play a supporting role—and that means it will have to be, and appear to be, purer than usual. Can anyone name the last two or three NIC chairmen? (I can't.) They aren't high-profile figures, and there's a reason for that.

Chas Freeman is a high-profile figure. He became one by his own design, through public speeches, some of them deliberately provocative. Making him NIC chairman would—unjustly but unavoidably—hurl all intelligence, and all policy based on intelligence, into the fray of fractious politics.

However, this is where Freeman's foes misplayed their hand. Had they let Freeman step into the job, they could have used him as the whipping boy for all foreign-policy measures they don't like—especially those involving the Middle East and China—and it might have been easier for them to rally opposition. But now it will be indisputably clear that the president is the one making policy. They're left with Barack Obama as their target—and one thing that's clear, so far, is that those who sling mud at Obama wind up hitting themselves.