Former CIA Deputy Director: “The Arab Spring Was a Boon to Islamic Extremists”
Now that he’s no longer in office, it appears that the former Deputy Director of the CIA – Michael Morell – has decided to make some money as an author. He’s written a book about his career called The Great War of Our Time. As you might guess from the title, it focuses largely on post-9/11 events.
Here’s what he had to say about the “Arab Spring”. It explains quite a bit, actually.
“We thought and told policy-makers that this outburst of popular revolt would damage al-Qaeda by undermining the group’s narrative. [Instead], the Arab Spring was a boon to Islamic extremists across both the Middle East and North Africa. From a counterterrorism perspective, the Arab Spring had turned to winter.”
Yeah, that explains – at least in part – why we sat on our hands and watched while longstanding allies went down the tubes. But it doesn’t explain why we “screwed the pooch” so badly on that call.
I understand quite well that intel is not an exact science. But historically, whenever an authoritarian regime has collapsed, a temporary power vacuum is created. If there’s not someone immediately around to pick up the pieces, things get chaotic.
Terrorist organizations do rather well in chaotic situations. So I kinda wonder why we didn’t foresee the real possibility that the Arab Spring might create a chaotic situation that al Qaeda and its ideological brethren could exploit.
Maybe it was as simple as a case of “telling the boss what he wanted to hear”. After all, when the boss makes it clear they only want to hear news with which they agree . . . well, that’s what they’ll get, true or not.
That kinda seems to me to have been the case some 35+ years ago in Iran. Maybe that’s what happened here too.
The Washington Post has a reasonably good article about the guy’s book, and briefly covers a few other things he talks about in it as well. If you have a few spare minutes, the article might be worth a read.
Category: "Your Tax Dollars At Work", Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Foreign Policy, Government Incompetence
Amazing how they all get religion when they get out of the business they used to feather their nest for so many years.
I watched all of the Arab Spring events while they were happening and wondered if anyone had considered the consequences to it. The moment it was reported that the Muslim Brotherhood – and we all know their ties – was in charge, I knew what would happen. And it did.
These things don’t happen in a vacuum. There are long-term consequences, which no one thinks about. We’re seeing them now in the Middle East, and have been for months.
Agreed, Ex-PH2 – with one caveat.
We haven’t really started feeling much of the Arab Spring’s long-term effects. Much of what we’re seeing today is IMO still fallout from “Jimmuh the Clueless” mishandling the Iranian Revolution and the Invasion of Afghanistan. Those get handled properly, and things would be very different in Islamic world today.
I would opine that it goes back even farther than Carter. The 1953 coup that overthrew a democratically elected government in favor of one favored by BP and backed by the CIA further unsettled an already rough region…
The one backed by the KGB, you forgot to say…
Bingo.
Empires expand or collapse. Russia – and later the Soviet Union – long had historical designs on obtaining portions of the Middle East. They effectively occupied the northern half of that nation during World War II, and really never left entirely after the war ended – until after Operation Ajax in 1953.
There’s a very good chance that Iran would have ended up at a minimum under Soviet domination (like Finland) or outright control (like the Warsaw Pact nations) during the Cold War had Operation Ajax never been executed. I’m guessing the latter.
I am quite pissed. Because, according to Drudge, Pam Gellar is now being openly threatened and those MMF’ers are boasting about having “trained” soldiers in 5 states. Something should be done about the watch list and who’s on it. Get them all the out. Yesterday.
They don’t get to do this shit on American Soil, against Americans. It’s wrong and anyone who is PC about it and says it’s nothing is delusional.
Well spoken…..
Funny, I seem to remember some of the policy pundits explaining at the beginning of the Egyptian uprisings that Bubarak’s removal would lead to a power vacuum that would be filled by the Muslim Brotherhood, as they already had a power mechanism in place that would sway the elections to them. Why is it that the inside the beltway private gurus could see it coming, but not the CIA?
Because the
EmperorPOTUS didn’t want to hear that, perhaps?“We thought and
told policy-makersØbama told us that this outburst of popular revolt would damage al-Qaeda by undermining the group’s narrative”?Wait a minute–so it turns out you’re NOT supposed to knock off middle-east dictators and then just walk away?
No shit?
This would be the same guy who said there were no orders to stand down at Benghazi and called the allegations by Republicans regarding Benghazi completely without evidentiary support.
So we can conclude that it was a case of incompetence as there were no stand down orders, apparently no one actually bothered to read or believe the memos from the ambassador.
He also states that the CIA had little ability to understand the dynamics of the 2011 Arab Spring in Tunisia.
“There is no good explanation for our not being able to see the pressures growing to dangerous levels across the region,” he writes. The agency had again relied too heavily “on a handful of strong leaders in the countries of concern to help us understand what was going on in the Arab street,” he says, and those leaders themselves were clueless.
So he was 2nd in command during this period of self acknowledged incompetence at gathering appropriate intelligence and appropriate analysis.
And now he intends to profit by exposing his lack of leadership and core competence at an agency he worked at for 33 years…is this a great country or what?
You can tell the world you were a fucking incompetent government agency buffoon as the people you were leading weren’t doing their jobs because you did nothing to change the direction or culture of the traditional intel gathering mechanisms and use an alternate media source that reporters were using and offering a more realistic analysis that differed from the official CIA talking points.
Amazing. He should take over at APL immediately, incompetence at that level needs to be recognized.