Flashbacks and Feedback Loops: IS Intel scandal harkens back to Iraq war debate

The revelation that Pentagon intelligence reports on the campaign to “degrade and destroy” the Islamic State were doctored to reinforce the administration’s narrative that we are winning is remarkable, given the fact that President Obama campaigned on the allegation that the Iraq War under George W. Bush was based on false intelligence regarding weapons of mass destruction.  After all the blood and treasure spilled in Iraq, one would think that the current policymakers at The White House and The Pentagon would have learned the history lesson.  But this is not the case.

While politics might be expected to play a major role in the administration’s statements that the air campaign in Syria is succeeding, the White House appears determined to present a positive spin to all events on the ground: from Russian intervention to Iranian meddling to the Gulf States’ and Turkey’s inability to coordinate their support to the opposition, the Syrian debacle is starting to look more and more like the dark days of the Iraq War.

Beyond the fact that there are no American boots on the ground in Syria, every other scenario present in the Iraq War is also evident in Syria today: Iranian sponsorship of government and paramilitary forces, a radical Sunni Islamist insurgency, and the fracturing of the Syrian state along sectarian lines.

It seems that the CENTCOM intelligence analysts have tried to present a realistic picture, only to be rebuffed by superiors. Allegedly, intelligence on terror activity was removed and replaced with economic or environmental data in reports so as to downplay bad news.  Furthermore, according to one report:

“It became pretty clear if they wrote something bad, it was likely to be changed,” the source added. “Knowing that bad news on ISIS wasn’t welcome meant that, over time, the picture of the fight began being rosier.”

Although intelligence analysts are tasked with presenting information to policymakers that reflects the facts on the ground, this indicates that there was considerable pressure to spin the findings as positive.

This pressure is likely to result in what is known as a feedback loop, which is when conclusions about a topic are used to generate new information, validating a set of beliefs with no new inputs. For example if reporting on a successful coalition airstrike is favored, it may lead to a cycle of overemphasis on coalition strikes over negative indicators in the future, which becomes the basis for a claim that the U.S. strategy is succeeding.

As the Pentagon’s Inspector General and the Senate Armed Services Committee conduct their investigations, it becomes apparent that the Obama administration’s has succumbed to politicization of intelligence they once criticized.