Wargate Flashback: the "Story Driver" Story

by RonK, Seattle

Bush chose Veterans Day as the occasion for another "bring 'em on" speech -- this one directed at his domestic critics.  OK, George, it's on ... and your side is going down. You took us to war on the wings of a lie, and that story that won't go away no matter how many nails you pound into its coffin and how much dirt you throw on top.

In fact, it's been "on" all along. Reproduced below -- for the encouragement of those who wanted a pony for Fitzmas and only got a Scooter -- is a piece I published on DailyKos back in June 2003, shortly before Joe Wilson went public.

It's a story about "story drivers". As I wrote then:

The story runs in multiple theaters. ... Each story driver is a little vortex with its own energy source and its own angular momentum. Each turns whether the media cyclops is watching or not. The little vortices will feed off each other in complex patterns of energy exchange ... orbiting, colliding, dispersing, resolving and merging until they produce one hellacious turbulent whirlwind.

In retrospect, I probably overestimated the pace of Tony Blair's slide, but the Reaper is coming for his political skin. I neglected one important driver: every "insider" has only part of the story, and wants to know more at the same time they want deniability of what they already know. Every step they take in both regards will leave tracks.

Below the fold, from Sunday, June 22 2003, WMD -- the Mosaic Speaks:
[Edited to restore dead links, but otherwise intact.]

WMD -- the Mosaic Speaks

From earlier WaPo discussion of a DIA report leaked all over Hell and back, "DIA's analysis is just one piece of an intelligence mosaic that Rumsfeld ... could consider".

Good analogy. Intelligence on any subject -- military, industrial, or complex -- is a mosaic. It's usually a mosaic read from glimpses between structures, through breaks in seasonal foliage, from reflections, hearsay, opportunistic snapshots from varied angles and distances. Even if we get the essential geometry right, we are almost always standing too close or too far away to make out the pattern directly.

An intel estimate is a product of the collective mind's eye, subject to every conceivable trick of the interior light.

Recently I suggested the intel fiasco would pull key blocks out of Dubya's Jenga tower. Skeptics objected, citing public apathy, Presidential popularity, a hapless media, a Republican House and Senate (not to mention the courts), a cowed and compromised opposition, and the fact that (short of impeachment) Bush has the last word on everything.

All true, but the "missing WMD" story has legs ... and fangs. Here's a look ahead.

 

First, the story is not going away. End to end, the Process failed ... and it failed in the second worst possible way. Iraq's WMD programs were longstanding major foci. The findings were pivotal. The stakes were enormous. And the findings were comprehensively wrong, damaging national security in ways that will take years to appreciate.

Damned if they knew it. If senior officials strong-armed agency heads into affirming bogus assessments, intel officers at every level had a higher duty to break protocol and sound alarms.

Damned if they didn't. If "the integrity of our process was maintained throughout" (as Tenet asserts), and senior officials acted on the best intel money can buy, we're all in a world o' hurt. Ain't broke, can't fix it, expect more of the same next time. Not acceptable. Not for a nascent empire, or for the leading power in a dangerous world.

Either way, there's no broom big enough, nor carpet thick enough, to sweep this cowpie under the rug.

When NASA loses a Shuttle, they reconstruct the course of events in excruciating detail. When a terrorist bombing succeeds, forensics experts reconstruct the event, particle by particle, transaction by transaction, until they can play the tape backwards and forwards. This was the intel equivalent of an aircraft carrier disappearing without a trace, and we need answers.

Both intel and warfighting are steeped in the culture of review and refinement ... after-action walkthroughs, "lessons learned", meta-analysis, triangulation, red-team exercises. Intel failures get scrutinized, successes get scrutinized, middling muddles get scrutinized after the fact ... to qualify sources, calibrate filters, plug holes, compensate for internal bias and improve resistance to hostile manipulation.

Routine autopsies of Iraq intel were chartered and resourced long before the first boot hit the sand. We always expect to learn a lot by comparing overlays of pre-war and post-war assessments. We just never expect to learn this much.

 

Second, there's a galaxy of touch-points. "The Process" comprises host individuals and organizational units, decisions, communications and data points. Each can be the one little clue that blows the cover-up. Lots of good story material here ... secrets and lies ... leaks, rumors of leaks, rumors of rumors ... true life confessions, mystery action drama, "Celebrity Death Match" swearing contests, betrayals and come-uppances. Everybody loves a good come-uppance.

• There's a perfect example in the dust-up over forged Niger uranium documents. Unnamed administration sources tried to hang it neatly on the CIA -- "nobody ever told us". If "White House sources" believe the White House line, they haven't done their in-house diligence ... or they were bluffing each other. If they thought they could put one over on the agencies, they were naive. If they knew they were off-base, it means they are at a loss for playable lines of defense.

The slow-motion train wreck -- with a pinch of suspense to keep everybody on the edge of their seats -- is great master narrative. We can see a slew of subplots shaping up, and others will bubble up out of the ferment. For instance

• US pressures UK to send more troops. For consistency with all he's said before, Tony Blair must comply ... while Parliament, on current evidence, must refuse. Either Blair stays (and more troops go), or troops stay home (and Blair goes), or Blair stays (but expressly revokes his commitment to Plan Iraq), or Blair stays (but weakly knuckles under). Many of Blair's party wish the WMD question would fade into the back pages, but the issue doesn't admit much middle ground.

An inexorable force is on collision course with an inexcusable object.

There's no end of minor story drivers.

Electoral politics will drive the story. Sen. Bob Graham (former Intelligence Committee Chair) suggests intelligence was selectively declassified to slant the public debate. Sen. John Edwards -- currently on IC -- will have to take a stand or get off the stage. Gov. Dean can use the WMD issue to needle the hawks (Lieberman, Gephardt). Kerry can play it cagey (if he doesn't out-maneuver himself). A Wesley Clark -- or even an Al Gore -- could swoop in late, strafing Bush with hard questions about missing WMDs, cooked intel, unsustainable deployments and alienated allies.

Newshounds will drive the story. Ever since a couple of no-names brought down Nixon, would-be Woodwards and Bernsteins have been making pests of themselves, running in packs, trampling somebody's Rose Garden to break stories that weren't even there in the first place. This is different. Real stories, and careers to be made.

The chattering classes will drive the story. This ecosystem includes echelons of talking heads, authors of "war is kewl" hardcovers, think-tankers and tank-thinkers whose accustomed lifestyles depend on being taken seriously. Scholarly and punditory reputations are on the line, hung out to dry, flapping in the breeze. Each is involuntarily immersed in a whitewater rapids of revisionism. Some of the most righteous indignation will come from opinion leaders who swallowed the WMD story hook, line and sinker, and who and bellowed most intemperately at their more circumspect peers. The finger will be pointed. The arrow of blame will fly until it finds its mark.

Bureaucratic infighting will drive the story. The system broke down, but the responsible components haven't yet been red-tagged. Org units at every level will wage mortal combat over who covered their bases, who screwed up, who went along willingly, who was asleep at the switch, who was dragged kicking and screaming to "consensus".

Career professionals will drive the story. They expect a lot of guff from political levels -- it comes with the territory -- but a line has been crossed and double-crossed. Up and down every hierarchy, there will be battles of personal vindication against "fall guy" designations. Like the War on Terrorism, some of these battles will be on visible on center stage -- whistleblowing, testifying, resigning or contesting administrative reprisals. Other battles will be waged in the shadows -- leaking, sandbagging, backstabbing and engineering indirect reprisals.

Defectors will drive the story. UNMOVIC inspectors and NGO weapons experts are already speaking more freely ... reporting that Powell's "decontamination vehicle" was just a plain red fire truck. Some pro's are accelerating their retirements, improving their availability when called upon. Regular military -- from grunts to generals -- are coming back from the field empty-handed and pissed off. When enough handwriting is on the wall, political cadre will start to turn ... and then it becomes a survival contest to see who can turn fastest.

Unforeseen events will drive the story. Terrorist attacks, home field or away, with or without WMDs. Conventional hotspots anywhere, as a mired and tired Iraq corps wonders "What are we doing over here, when the trouble's over there?". Foreign intrigue of any kind, but especially WMD proliferation cases where US intel becomes an issue.

Body bags will drive the story. The War on Whatever will send home one or two a day to families who demand answers. Most KIA are singletons, but in time the opposition will make a bigger score ... ten or twenty, 50 or 100 ... front-page news. From here on out, every War Story is automatically a "Why?" Story.

Formal investigations will drive the story. Not big comprehensive investigations, necessarily, but at least hearings on the subplots. Investigations of leaks, investigations of reprisals, investigations of cover-ups. Routine hearings on readiness and budgets can't help boiling over ... witnesses will butt heads and swearing contests will erupt over secrets and lies. Investigations will follow. Their restricted charters and unanswered questions will drive more investigations.

Litigation may drive the story. Anything from wrongful termination to wrongful death, and possibly from unexpected quarters. Was the smallpox scare hyped at election time to reinforce the WMD scare? Families of vaccination fatalities might raise hell. Most of it will be the familiar whistleblower sagas and document disclosure battles.

Conversions will drive the story. Big names took forceful positions in the fevered run-up to war. Facing a relentless rain of facts on the ground, most of them will eventually recant ... name by name, drop by drop. Some reversals-of-field are newsworthy per se. ("I was brainwashed!") Others become newsworthy when former allies become adversaries. Die-hards will huddle together under increasingly threadbare umbrellas of denial. Some will push themselves over the edge into sheer fantasy ... and these increasingly desperate holdouts may themselves become newsworthy.

The story runs in multiple theaters. Breaks in each story nudge the others forward ... as do inconsistencies in testimony across spatial and organizational distances.

• In the UK, Tony Blair is in real trouble. Excepting minor apologies over February's "dodgy dossier", he refuses to back down ... or even to treat inquiries with respect. He's at odds with his own intel services (whose leaks to date may only be warning shots). He'll catch opportunistic flak from Tory opposition (though most supported the war), from the Liberal Democrat left, from doves, rivals and "old left" factions in his own New Labour party. Like Bush, he's banking on a lucky break. Unlike Bush, he's neglected to hedge out his long position in WMDs with options on the language of processes, capabilities, ambiguities and alternative casus belli.

And there are extensive networks of liaisons between the combatants in all these arenas ... pols, pundits, bureaucrats, commanders, journalists and jurists cultivate confederates in other camps, and they acquire obligations of mutual defense in doing so.

Did Plan Iraq's marketing geniuses think their pre-war campaign of selective, strategic disclosures was clever? They ain't seen nothin' yet.

Each story driver is a little vortex with its own energy source and its own angular momentum. Each turns whether the media cyclops is watching or not. The little vortices will feed off each other in complex patterns of energy exchange ... orbiting, colliding, dispersing, resolving and merging until they produce one hellacious turbulent whirlwind.

The overall process envelope is predetermined. Details are chaotically unpredictable. The intermediate stages are an intricate Kabuki pageant of pretenses, disclosures, betrayals. Good entertainment, plenty of chances to put the BREAKING NEWS banners to work.

Can Bush ride it out? Perhaps. He must find a robustly connected network of fall guys, get them to pick up all the stones of guilt, and neatly cut them loose. Reagan pulled it off in Iran-Contra ... but that was small potatoes. Who cared?

This one won't be so easy. There are too many moving pieces, too many connections and cut-points, too many players with too many cover stories. To leave Dubya with a whole skin, too many of the Good have to go quietly. Too many of the Bad and the Ugly have to double-cross their own lifelines. If Bush has a compartmentalization option, I don't see it.

Uncharacteristically, the administration is dazed and confused, chattering at cross-purposes, indecisive on defense, hoping for a break that's not in the cards. "We found WMDs." No. "Too early to tell." Frankly, no. "WMDs don't matter." No. "They used to have WMDs". No credit. "They had the capacity to create WMDs". No credit. "WMDs are buried so deep we'll never find 'em". No. "Saddam was a human WMD". Omigod, no!

Every major name in GWB's national security apparatus is operating on borrowed time. They can buy time by throwing each other to the wolves ... but in the long run that only bulks up the wolf population.

The purge will play out as a parade of scapegoats, turncoats, denunciations, eviscerations, removals-by-pretext, ideological reformations, historical revisions, strategic retreats and spontaneous routs.

As suggested in the earlier post, many tempest-tossed chickens will come home to roost in Dick Cheney's undisclosed location. Dubya's biggest decision as CEO was choosing Cheney, and most of the key "names" are Cheney's people. If Cheney takes the fall, he takes half the administration with him ... and leaves the other half hurting.

From source cultivation to policy application, the Intelligence Process itself is a mosaic. By design, the few tiles made visible hardly ever tell their tales.

But this is different. The Process becomes, recursively, a major focus of The Process. Every tile, shard and pebble will be picked over until a coherent picture emerges. And of necessity, these stones will learn to speak.

Comments

[DJean]

RonK: This essay is breathtaking. Brilliant and, to my war-weary soul, inspiring. Thanks for putting this tale so eloquently.

[al-Fubar]

Brilliant.

The wall of lies has taken longer to crack than you perhaps expected, certainly longer than any of us hoped.

But perhaps the flip side of that is that its fall will be all the harder. Everywhere you look - not just regarding Iraq, but across the field - there's a sense of nearly inexorable collapse. Everything in Bushworld was buttressed against everything else, and now it is all shuddering, fracturing, coming apart at the seams.

-- Rick

[orchid314]

The implosion of the Bush Presidency reminds me of the collapse of Enron in the way the latter happened on such a spectacular scale and in so short a time. In both cases, neither organization was actually performing the tasks assigned to it by voters or shareholders--that is, governing or providing services to customers--but instead both outfits were obsessed with manipulating perceptions and concealing evidence of the fraud they had committed.

[Davis X. Machina]

My sympathies, RonK. You join the ranks of those who have felt the lash of (Howard) Dean's Law -- and he inherited it from George McGovern, who inherited it from...

In politics, the only thing worse than being wrong is being right too soon.

[LindyH]

God almighty, that was a nice piece. Not only was it very clear, it was also very pretty.

[Mimikatz]

It certainly did take longer than expected, longer than it should have. Bush gave his game plan away today when he accused the Dems of "rewriting history"--exactly what he himself is up to.

But it is also unraveling faster than expected, what with the lids coming off the intel reports, the implosion of the budget, DeLay out of action because he was too clever by half banking the playing field because he knew he couldn't win otherwise . . . .

They are going down, no mistake about it, victims of their own schemes. The one thing they forgot to do was govern, it is a major cause of their undoing.

[RonK, Seattle]

I expected it to take time. I still expect it to take time.

It shouldn't have taken this much time, though. Cheney shouldn't have made the 2004 ticket, and Bush shouldn't have won, and maybe shouldn't have completed his first term ... and wouldn't have if either the media, or the Democrats, or the GOP grown-ups were on their "A" game. Now we have an administration consigned to a full four years in purgatory, while the damage control backlog piles up around them.

Now, about this Rove fellow. Eager beavers are upset that he's still in the White House ... but every day he's in there hastens the collapse. When he walks into a meeting, or dials in on a conference call, or appears on a memo or email cc list, a chill enters the space with him. Everyone becomes hypervigilante about what they do, and what they say, and what they hear, and what they do or don't put down on paper, and what the do or don't tell anybody else afterward.

A cancer growing on the Presidency? I dunno. Leprosy, at least.

[John Palcewski]

Brilliant analysis, bravo. When Bush was re-elected I found myself in a state of numb shock. It could only mean that something truly awful had happened in the US. What a pity that it has taken so long for pieces of the machinery to realign. Every day of delay until the fascist NeoCon government is neutralized means that still more US servicemen/women die. Blood is on the hands of Cheney, Rove et.al. I still can't wrap my mind around why the American electorate allowed this to happen. As the machine grinds to a halt, boys and girls are still dying over there. And I remain shocked and numbed. And nauseated.

[Susan S]

Brilliant analysis. Thanks.

[rasmus]

I still think the overarching historical narrative will be that it was all about his father.

Bush's first term was about getting re-elected for a second term, to not repeat his father's mistake of doing what was best for the country (not invading Iraq) instead of what was best for himself (invading Iraq). Everything the son did, consciously and subconsciously, was about getting re-elected. Invading Iraq is #1 on that list.

His second term is and will continue to be about how the cost of getting re-lected (in every sense, financial, human, moral, political, even social) bankrupted him.

[Marysz]

Great analysis, Ron . . . is this intelligence mosaic you write about related to theory of The Wisdom of Crowds, or has the administration finally reached the Tipping Point, where its corruption has finally become manifest to the majority?

Previous administrations have been problematic to the extreme, but what distinguishes this one is, as mimikatz points out, its complete and total failure to govern. This adminstration wants the political power that comes from being the majority party, but is contemptuous of even the most basic responsibilities of governance. This incompetence has soured the American people on them. But, in the long run, it's the the Administration's underlying money trail that will take the most sleuthing to untangle.