Friedman Op-Ed article on need for people who know languages

[Harold F. Schiffman]

>>From the NYTimes,December 9, 2004

OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Suicide Supply Chain
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

>>From what I can tell from the new organizational flow chart for U.S.
intelligence that Congress adopted yesterday, it is a god-awful
combination of new titles and jobs at the top, without clear lines of
authority to the people on the ground. One thing I've learned from 25
years in the newspaper business (which is just another form of
intelligence gathering) is this: Whenever you add a new layer of editors
on top of reporters, and don't get rid of some of the old layer of
editors, all you get is trouble. You get less intelligent.

The right way to improve U.S. intelligence is to get more people on the
ground who speak the languages we need and who can think unconventionally.
If that sounds blindingly obvious to you, it is, but it is precisely the
shortage of such people that explains to me America's greatest
intelligence failure in Iraq - a failure we are paying for dearly right
now. You see, we didn't invade Iraq too soon. We actually invaded 10 years
too late.

Let me explain: America's greatest intelligence failure in Iraq was not
the W.M.D. we thought were there, but weren't. It was the P.M.D. we
thought weren't there, but were. P.M.D., in my lexicon, stands for "people
of mass destruction." And there were far more of them in Iraq than anyone
realized. The failure of U.S. intelligence to understand what was
happening inside Iraqi society during the decade-plus of U.N. sanctions
that preceded our invasion is the key to many of the problems we've
encountered in post-Saddam Iraq.

The U.N. sanctions pulverized Iraqi society - a society already beaten
down by an eight-year Iran-Iraq war, the war over Kuwait and some 30 years
of Saddam's tyranny. As Saddamism and sanctions chewed up the Iraqi people
during the 1990's, many people of talent left. Before the war, the Bush
team told anyone who would listen that Iraq had the most talented secular
elite in the Arab world. And it was right. The only problem was that
during the 1990's many in that elite moved to Amman, Damascus, Beirut, Abu
Dhabi, Bahrain and Cairo, where they worked as professors, music teachers
and engineers.

Meanwhile, back in Iraq, those who had no access to Baath Party privileges
got steadily ground down. Many Iraqi youth, unable to connect with the
outside world and unable to find jobs at home, turned to religion. Saddam
encouraged this with a mosque-building program. By wrapping himself in an
aura of Islam, Saddam also hoped to buttress his own waning legitimacy. So
Wahhabi religious influence flowed into the Sunni areas from Saudi Arabia,
as Iranian religious influence flowed into Shiite regions.

You know all those masked Iraqi youth you see in the Al Jazeera videos,
brandishing weapons and standing over some foreigner whose head they are
about saw off? They are the product of the last decade of Saddamism and
sanctions. Those youth were 10 years old when the U.N. sanctions began.
They are the mushrooms that Saddam and the sanctions were growing in the
dark. The Bush team had no clue they were there.

These deracinated, unemployed, humiliated Sunni Iraqi youth are our
biggest problem today. Some clearly have become suicide bombers. We can't
say what percentage, because, unlike the Palestinians, the Iraqi suicide
bombers don't even bother to tell us their names or do a farewell video
for mom. They not only are ready to commit suicide on demand, but they are
ready to do it anonymously. That bespeaks a very high level of commitment
or psychosis, or both.

I would estimate that U.S. forces have been hit with over 200 of these
human missiles, and we still are not sure how they are recruited and
deployed. What we are facing, I think, is a crude underground suicide
supply chain - a mutant combination of Wal-Mart and Wahhabism.

Its organizers appear to use word of mouth, and the Internet, to recruit
suicide bombers from Iraq and the wider Muslim world. These bombers are
ferried down the supply chain to bomb makers in the field, who get them
wired up and deploy them against U.S. and Iraqi targets tactically.

This is not haphazard. These bombings are timed for maximum effect. That
means the insurgents are quite confident about their supply of bombers.
It's just like Wal-Mart's supply chain: you buy an item in a Wal-Mart in
Arkansas, and another one is immediately made in China. In Iraq, you
deploy a suicide bomber in Baghdad, and another one is immediately
manufactured in Mosul or Riyadh.

When we have people in U.S. intelligence who can explain how that
organizational flow chart works, I'll feel safer.