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Turkey: Another U.S. Intelligence Failure
[RealClearDefense] A less-well known but vital outcome of NATO's Warsaw summit was the Alliances' decision to create an intelligence and security division from among its existing organizations. This move is long overdue. There is a plethora of threats facing Europe and the United States, and yet the West has a record of intelligence failures that has come to characterize its policy today. As media reports indicate, the Turkish coup caught virtually the entire US foreign policy establishment by surprise; analysts were writing up to the last moment that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's control over the military seemed secure.Intelligence failures are always going to occur no matter how governments structure their intelligence networks, but this is only the latest in a series of policy failures in which governments have blamed their intelligence organizations. In this regard, the US record is stunning. We already know that the US government and intelligence services failed to grasp the planning for 9/11 or to understand the realities in Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion, including the absence of nuclear weapons there. Additionally, as former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates admitted, the Untied States failed to grasp the scope of China's military buildup, and did not realize that Russia would attack Georgia in 2008. More significantly, the United States missed the full nature of changes underway in the Russian military after 2008. Although it was clear to many analysts that Russian President Vladimir Putin would invade if Ukraine signed an association agreement with the EU and launched a westernizing revolution, the Obama administration--despite warnings from its intelligence community--could not formulate a coherent assessment of what was happening. In fact, Ukrainian parliamentarians told me in October 2013 that they believed Putin would invade if Ukraine signed the accords with the EU; it is incomprehensible that the US Embassy did not know this. And if it did, the administration should have. Posted by: Blossom Unains5562 2016-07-22 |
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