As Miller later acknowledged, in these years the United States acted not as an evenhanded mediator, but rather as “Israel’s lawyer.” U.S. peace proposals were cleared with Israel in advance, and Israeli proposals were often presented to the Palestinians as if they were American initiatives.33 Small wonder that Palestinian leaders had little confidence in U.S. bona fides and little reason to believe U.S. assurances that their interests would be protected.
This unsuccessful past was prologue to an even less successful future. After spending the Bush years as counselor for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a prominent pro-Israel think tank, Dennis Ross joined Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008 and returned to the National Security Council during Obama’s first term. Originally assigned to work on U.S. policy toward Iran, over time Ross became more and more heavily involved in Israel-Palestine issues, reportedly clashing with Obama’s designated Middle East envoy, former senator George Mitchell.34 Ross was also deeply skeptical about a possible nuclear deal with Iran, and significant progress toward the 2015 agreement took place only after he left the White House at the end of Obama’s first term.35
Similarly, Indyk spent the Bush years as founding director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings, where he openly backed the Iraq War in 2003.36 When Secretary of State John Kerry decided to make a new push for an agreement in 2013, he picked not a fresh face with new ideas, but the well-worn Indyk, who in turn chose as his deputy David Makovsky, a hawkish neoconservative from WINEP who had coauthored a book with Ross in 2008.37
Revealingly, the one member of Clinton’s Middle East team who had trouble returning to government service was Robert Malley, who was also the most skeptical of the traditional U.S. approach. Malley was briefly affiliated with Obama’s campaign in 2008, only to be dropped after it was revealed that he had met with representatives of Hamas in the context of his duties at the nongovernmental International Crisis Group (ICG). These activities should not have disqualified him from advising a candidate—he was not serving in the U.S. government at that time, and communicating with Hamas was an integral part of his work at ICG—but the political liability was too great, and Obama quickly distanced himself. Malley returned to the NSC during Obama’s second term, but his duties were confined to Iran and the Gulf.
Resolving this long, bitter conflict would be a challenging task for anyone, and an entirely different set of U.S. officials might have failed to achieve an agreement between 1993 and 2016. One might also argue that only experienced diplomats with deep knowledge of the issues and the key players would stand any chance at all of reaching an agreement. Even so, the willingness of presidents and secretaries of state to recycle the same unsuccessful negotiators is troubling. The individuals who repeatedly failed to make peace were hardly the only people in America with intimate knowledge of these issues, and had Clinton, Bush, or Obama put this problem in the hands of experts who had a fresh and more evenhanded outlook, America’s long stewardship of the peace process might have been more successful. Given where the conflict was in 1993 and where it is today, and given the potential leverage the United States had over the protagonists, Washington could hardly have done worse.
INSIDERS ON INTELLIGENCE
The same reluctance to hold individuals and organizations accountable can also be found in the management and oversight of America’s vast intelligence community. By 2016 it was obvious to even casual observers that oversight of the intelligence agencies had gone badly awry. These organizations not only failed to detect or prevent the 9/11 attacks—despite numerous warning signs—they also played a supporting role in the Bush administration’s fairy tales about Iraq’s WMD programs and Saddam Hussein’s supposed connections to Al Qaeda.38 U.S. intelligence agencies suffered a further blow when a supposed informant (who turned out to be a double agent) detonated a suicide bomb that killed seven CIA employees and contractors in Afghanistan in December 2009. It took U.S. intelligence nine years to find Osama bin Laden, and it also failed to anticipate the Arab Spring, the Maidan uprising in Ukraine, or Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2013. And in January 2018 The New York Times revealed that a former CIA officer had been arrested for providing China with the names of more than a dozen CIA informants, in what it called “one of the American government’s worst intelligence failures in recent years.”39
Last but not least, the vast trove of information on the NSA’s electronic surveillance programs leaked by former contractor Edward Snowden revealed serious security lapses within the agency and numerous violations of U.S. law. Subsequent revelations about NSA foreign surveillance activities (such as the hacking of German chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone) suggested that the NSA was now acting with scant regard for the potential risks or political fallout.
Yet despite these repeated lapses and abuses of power, no one in the intelligence community was held to account. In 2011, in fact, a lengthy investigation of CIA personnel policies by the Associated Press revealed “a disciplinary system that takes years to make decisions, hands down reprimands inconsistently, and is viewed inside the agency as prone to favoritism and manipulation.” Among other things, the investigation found that even after an internal review board had recommended disciplinary action for an analyst whose mistaken identification had led to an innocent German being kidnapped and held at a secret prison in Afghanistan for five months, the employee in question was promoted to a top job at the CIA’s counterterrorism center. Other officials involved in the deaths of prisoners in Afghanistan went undisciplined and received promotions instead. On the rare occasions when agency personnel were forced to resign, they sometimes returned to work as independent contractors.40
Immunity increases as one rises to the top. In March 2013 the director of national intelligence James Clapper told a congressional oversight committee that the NSA was not “willingly” collecting data on U.S. citizens, a statement he later conceded was false after Snowden’s files revealed that the NSA had been doing exactly that.41 Lying to Congress is a criminal offense, but Clapper was not investigated. On the contrary, a White House spokesperson soon confirmed that President Obama had “full confidence” in him.
The career of former CIA director John Brennan exhibited a similar Teflon-like quality. Brennan was reportedly Obama’s first choice as CIA director in 2009 but was passed over because his prior involvement in Bush-era interrogation and detention practices made Senate confirmation questionable. He joined the White House staff instead, where he managed the administration’s “kill list” of individuals deemed eligible for lethal “signature strikes.”42 In that capacity, Brennan gave a well-publicized speech in June 2011 defending the administration’s policy, claiming, in response to a question from the audience, that “for nearly the past year there hasn’t been a single collateral death [from counterterrorist drone strikes] due to the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.”43
According to the independent Bureau of Investigative Journalism, however, a CIA drone strike in Pakistan had killed forty-two people attending a tribal meeting just three months earlier. The Pakistani government had issued a strong public protest, casting serious doubt on Brennan’s claim that he “had no information” about civilians being killed. Nonetheless, Obama nominated him to head the CIA in January 2013, and the Senate promptly confirmed his appointment.
Then, in March 2014, the Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein accused the CIA of monitoring the computers used by congressional staff members who were investigating the CIA’s role in the detention and torture of terrorist suspects and in other illegal activities. Such shenanigans were not entirely new, insofar as CIA officials had previously destroyed ninety-two videotapes documenting acts of torture, a move almost certainly intended to protect the perpetrators from further investigation or prosecution.44 Other reports suggested that CIA officials were also monitoring emails between Daniel Meyer, the intelligence community official responsible f
or whistle-blower cases, and Senator Chuck Grassley, a leading advocate of whistle-blower protection.45
The obvious intent behind these actions was to keep Senate investigators from holding the CIA accountable for acts of torture or other illegal conduct. Brennan vehemently denied the accusations and the Department of Justice declined to investigate them, but a subsequent investigation by the CIA’s own inspector general confirmed the bulk of Feinstein’s original charges.46
In response, Brennan made a limited apology and appointed an internal review board to consider disciplinary actions.47 A few months later, the review board attributed the problem to “miscommunication” and exonerated all CIA personnel involved of any wrongdoing.48 Despite these well-founded concerns about Brennan’s truthfulness, as well as the evidence that reliance on “enhanced interrogation (i.e., torture) had done considerable damage to America’s reputation and strategic position,” Obama reaffirmed his “full confidence” in him, just as he had previously done with DNI Clapper.49
Because secrecy is pervasive, maintaining effective oversight and accountability over the intelligence community is a perennial challenge. Although the Senate and House Select Committees on Intelligence are supposed to provide this oversight, they lack the resources, staff, or electoral incentive to perform this task on a consistent basis. Instead, Congress tends to get seriously involved only after significant abuses come to light, and it inevitably faces stiff resistance from the agencies it is supposed to be monitoring. Under the circumstances, effective oversight and genuine accountability are bound to be rare to nonexistent.50
Adding to the difficulty is the incestuous nature of the intelligence community itself. Clapper was a former U.S. Air Force officer who subsequently worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency, directed the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), and served as undersecretary of defense for intelligence, overseeing the NSA, the NGA, and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). Brennan was a twenty-five-year CIA veteran who had held top jobs under Republicans and Democrats and ran the interagency National Counterterrorism Center before working at the White House and being appointed CIA director. One of Brennan’s predecessors at the CIA, Michael Hayden, was a retired air force general and had also been director of the National Security Agency and the U.S. Cyber Command. Former NSA director Keith Alexander held a variety of intelligence posts in the army and ran the Central Security Service and the U.S. Cyber Command. And former secretary of defense Robert Gates spent most of his career at the CIA, eventually rising to the post of deputy director before moving to the Pentagon under George W. Bush.51
There are obvious benefits to having experienced hands in these positions, and replacing veteran intelligence experts with untrained amateurs could easily make things worse. But relying so heavily on “company men” (and women) inevitably creates a cadre of leaders who are strongly inclined to protect the organization and opposed to strict accountability. Thus, Gina Haspel, who replaced CIA director Mike Pompeo following the latter’s appointment as secretary of state, helped oversee the Bush-era torture program and reportedly authorized the shredding of videotapes documenting these illegal activities. As one associate later described her: “She went to bat for the agency and the bottom line is her loyalty is impeccable.”52 The inbred and self-protective nature of the intelligence world may have its virtues, but it is not without significant vices as well.
The combination of pervasive secrecy and a semipermanent caste of national security managers goes a long way to explaining the remarkable continuity between the Bush and Obama administrations, as well as the latter’s reluctance to hold Bush or his lieutenants responsible for possible transgressions and failures. When the same people are making policy and advising both Republican and Democratic presidents, when the public has little independent information about their activities, and when congressional oversight is resisted at every turn, bad judgment and serious misconduct can go undetected and unpunished for a long time. This failing might not be a serious problem if these agencies and their top leaders were as omniscient as they pretend to be, and if they were reliably committed to genuine external oversight and rigorous internal accountability, but the history of the past several decades suggests otherwise. As with the rest of the foreign policy community, accountability in the world of intelligence is the exception rather than the rule.
THE MILITARY
Lives are on the line whenever the United States goes to war. We might therefore expect the U.S. military to be a highly meritocratic enterprise that does not tolerate poor performance and holds its members strictly accountable. There are clearly cases where this principle holds true, as in the U.S. Navy’s recent decision to discipline the commander and a dozen crew members of the USS Fitzgerald after a collision with a merchant ship cost the lives of seven crew members.53
Unfortunately, like the rest of the foreign policy establishment, the U.S. military has become less accountable over time, and this trend has compromised its ability to fulfill its assigned missions.54 Secretaries of defense are fond of saying that the United States “has the best military in the world,” but this well-trained and well-equipped fighting force has compiled a mostly losing record since the 1991 Gulf War. The United States has fought half a dozen wars since 1990, and apart from some gross mismatches (Iraq in 1990 and 2003 and Kosovo in 1999), its performance has not been impressive.55 The historian and retired army colonel Andrew Bacevich sums it up well: “Having been ‘at war’ for virtually the entire twenty-first century, the United States military is still looking for its first win.”56
For starters, consider the number of scandals that have embarrassed the armed services in recent years. Official Pentagon reports have revealed an epidemic of sexual assault inside military ranks, with an estimated nineteen thousand cases of rape or unwanted sexual contact (against both male and female personnel) occurring every year.57 This same period also saw several prominent cheating scandals, as when thirty-four ICBM launch control officers colluded to falsify scores on their proficiency exams. The abuses at Abu Ghraib prison are well-known, but U.S. military personnel have also committed other war crimes and atrocities, including the killing of sixteen Afghan civilians by Staff Sergeant Robert Bales in 2012.58
Moreover, for all the technological sophistication, tactical proficiency, and individual gallantry displayed by U.S. personnel in recent decades, they have repeatedly failed to achieve victory. The United States did not achieve its stated goal of either a stable, democratic Iraq or a stable, democratic Afghanistan, despite spending trillions of dollars and losing thousands of soldiers’ lives. It has been unable to create effective security forces in Afghanistan despite devoting years of effort and spending billions of dollars. A daring U.S. raid eventually found and killed bin Laden, but a decade of drone strikes and targeted killings in more than half a dozen countries has not eliminated the terrorist threat—and may have made it worse.59
Yet, as Thomas Ricks points out, “despite these persistent problems with leadership, one of the obvious remedies—relief of poor commanders—remained exceedingly rare.”60 Instead, the most frequent reason for relieving military officers of command is sexual misconduct, affecting roughly one out of every three commanders fired after 2005.61 But the armed forces’ losing record in its recent wars suggests that its commanders are either not leading well or not advising their civilian counterparts to end wars of choice that cannot be won.
Nor are they being held accountable. During the initial phases of the Afghan War, for example, the commanding general Tommy Franks failed to commit U.S. Army Rangers at the Battle of Tora Bora, a blunder that allowed Osama bin Laden—the key target of the entire U.S. invasion—to escape into Pakistan.62 A few months later, a similar error during Operation Anaconda allowed several hundred Al Qaeda members to evade capture as well. Yet Franks was subsequently chosen to command the invasion of Iraq in 2003. His performance there was no better: the outmatched Iraqis were quickly defeated, but Franks’s failure to prepare
for the post-invasion phase contributed to the full-blown insurgency that erupted after 2004.63
Even worse, the military has sometimes failed to hold officers and enlisted personnel fully accountable for more serious misconduct. In January 2004, troops under the command of the army lieutenant colonel Nathan Sassaman forced two handcuffed Iraqi prisoners to jump into the Tigris River, where one of them drowned. Sassaman was not present when the incident occurred, but he later ordered soldiers under his command to obstruct the army investigation of the incident. When the truth surfaced, the divisional commander Ray Odierno issued a written reprimand describing Sassaman’s conduct as “wrongful” and “criminal,” but did not relieve him of command. Although his once-promising career soon ended, Sassaman “was allowed to retire quietly.”64
Similarly, even after Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich, the Marine Corps squad leader whose troops killed twenty-four unarmed Iraqi civilians at Haditha, admitted he had told his men to “shoot first and ask questions later,” a deal with army prosecutors led to his pleading guilty to a single charge of “neglectful dereliction of duty.” His rank was reduced to private, but he served no time in the brig and eventually received a “general discharge under honorable conditions” that left him eligible for full veterans’ benefits. None of the other eight marines charged in the case were ever tried.65
Even the careers of such highly decorated commanders as Generals David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal illustrate a certain reluctance to hold prominent commanders fully accountable. A talented soldier with a flair for public relations, Petraeus enjoyed a glowing reputation as the driving force behind the 2007 “surge” in Iraq. McChrystal was also hailed as a hard-charging counterinsurgency expert whose leadership had helped turn the tide in Iraq and was going to do the same in Afghanistan. Both generals eventually suffered embarrassing personal setbacks: McChrystal was relieved of command after a Rolling Stone article described him and his staff making disparaging remarks about President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden; and Petraeus later resigned as director of the CIA after an extramarital affair with his biographer became public. He later pleaded guilty to charges of having given his paramour classified information and lying to the FBI, but he was given probation and a fine and served no jail time.
The Hell of Good Intentions Page 22
