On the major issues of the day affecting real strategic threats to the United States and other Western states, our intelligence agencies have been wrong more often than right. Have we been figured out?
There are two types of national security threats a country faces: nuissance and strategic. Traditional terrorism is in the 'nuissance' category, although WMD's threaten to elevate that to 'strategic'. We have often relied on our intelligence agencies to prevent terror threats from evolving into strategic threats by attempting to halt the development of such weapons by actors that may hand them off to terrorists. But if we don't know who is doing what - we can't stop it very effectively, either diplomatically or militarily, now can we?
The broad concept of "WMD" covers both nuclear and chemical/biological threats. In an ideal world, we stop the development of both by potentially bad actors. In a sub-ideal world, we recognize that the former are relatively easy to identify the development of and the latter are much more difficult to track. For this reason, it's more worrying if a nuclear program is successfully developed under our noses than a chemical or biological program.
And yet, over the past decade, we've both failed to anticipate successful programs and failed when addressing suspected but nonexistant programs.
In 1998:
May, 1998: India conducts five nuclear tests. Pakistan expresses alarm and then stuns the world by conducting its first nuclear bomb tests, six in all. President Clinton says United States is forced by law to impose sanctions on both countries. source
Pakistan, a country with a significant Islamist population and largely believed to be one successful assassination away from direct or indirect Al-Qaeda rule currently sits on a nuclear arsenal. Even with a 'friendly' rule, they have done things with the nuclear program that pose a strategic risk to the United States.
In 2003:
In a roundtable discussion with the United States and China in Beijing on April 24, 2003, North Korean officials admitted for the first time that they possessed nuclear weapons. Furthermore, North Korean officials claim to have reprocessed spent fuel rods and have threatened to begin exporting nuclear materials unless the United States agrees to one-on-one talks with North Korea. Source
Forget the Bush administration's approach for a second. I suspect everybody on this site agrees it's flawed, and preaching to the choir isn't my purpose. The underlying problem I wish to address is that we identified North Korea as a threat and at the same time were [at least publicly] caught completely by surprise by this development.
On the COMPLETE flip side, there was Iraq. I'm not going to roll up the quotes by all the leaders of both parties and around the world from the past decade completely convinced that Saddam Hussein had a weapons program going. I know there's a decent portion of you who believe he purposefully lied, nor do I believe highly suspected and believed WMD's were the only reason (and possibly not the biggest reason) for invasion. The problem here is that no matter how you cut it, and no matter how much you want to hate Bush - the belief that Iraq had WMD and the subsequent discovery that they did not have anything resembling a potent WMD program was first and foremost an intelligence failure of a catastrophic degree.
And it's not just the CIA. The Mossad and Israeli military intelligence, previously stellar organizations in the Middle East, were caught completely offguard and with their pants down regarding Hezbollah's latest capabilities. For example, they had no idea that Iran gave Hezbollah advanced anti-ship missiles, nor did they know about the bunker networks and several other crucial elements of the battlefield that have, in the past, been easily obtainable information for those intelligence agencies. Source.
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And so the question is.. what happened to our intelligence agencies? Did we cut their budgets back or tie their hands? Or alternatively, did they fail to adapt while other actors adapted to their tactics?
The only thing that's clear is that these failures (including overestimations as in the case of Iraq) have made terror a strategic threat to western states, and it would be nice to know why they happened.