Top CIA Expert Slams Bush Anti-Terror Actions
Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 21 (IPS) - The Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) recently retired top expert on radical Islamists has strongly denounced the conduct of U.S. President George W. Bush's "global war on terrorism" and the continued U.S. military presence in Iraq, which he said is "contributing to the violence".
In an interview published this week by the online edition of Harper's Magazine, Emile Nakhleh, who retired at the end of June as director of the agency's Political Islam Strategic Analysis Programme, said that the Bush administration's tactics had "lost a generation of goodwill in the Muslim world" and its Middle East democratisation programme "has all but disappeared, except for official rhetoric".
Nakhleh, who, before working for the CIA, taught Middle East politics for some 25 years, also called for Washington to "begin to explore creative ways to engage Iran and bring Iran and Shiite politics to the forefront of our policy in the region."
"The growing influence of Hezbollah, and its leader, Hasan Nasrallah, across the region and within the Sunni street, and the growing regional influence and reach of Iran, are two new realities that we should recognise and engage," he told Harper's editor, Ken Silverstein. The interview, Nakhleh's first since his retirement, echoes the views of a number of former intelligence officials and career diplomats who have criticised the administration for ignoring their analyses of the dynamics of Middle East politics, particularly their warnings of the challenges Washington would face if it invaded Iraq.
Last February, for example, Paul Pillar, the intelligence community's top Middle East analyst from 2000 until his retirement in late 2005, disclosed in Foreign Affairs magazine that the community had warned policymakers before the Iraq invasion that the war and occupation would "boost political Islam and increase sympathy for terrorists' objectives" and that a "deeply divided Iraqi society" would likely erupt into "violent conflict" unless the occupation authority "established security and put Iraq on the road to prosperity in the first few weeks or months after the fall of Saddam (Hussein)."
Pillar, as well as the Defence Intelligence Agency's former top Middle East analyst, Pat Lang, also accused the administration of distorting and politicising intelligence in order to build its case for going to war. In Pillar's words, "the administration used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision already made."
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=34825
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