The United Nations and Intelligence

Two stories have surfaced that raise big questions for the United States. The first deals with the UN publishing the movements of the Isreali Defense Forces during their dealings with Hezbollah. The second story raises doubts about our intelligence on Iran's nuclear ambitions. Now, what do these two stories have to do with one another? They speak to the quality of intelligence gathering in the post-Cold War era. If you are a terrorist in Lebanon wanting information about IDF movements, all you would need to do is log on to the UNIFIL website and read. But if you are a policy maker in Washington or a member of the National Security apparatus in the Bush Administration and you want to know when and if Iran could develop nuclear weapons, you are out of luck.

The Weekly Standard has recently published a piece detailing how UNIFIL went out of their way to announce specifics about IDF troop movements, types of weapons and where their supply lines were. Here's a little bit of what I am talking about: "UNIFIL posted not a single item of specific intelligence regarding Hezbollah forces. Statements on the order of Hezbollah "fired rockets in large numbers from various locations" and Hezbollah's rockets "were fired in significantly larger numbers from various locations" are as precise as its coverage of the other side ever got."

Now here is how they reported on the IDF movements: "Yesterday and during last night, the IDF moved significant reinforcements, including a number of tanks, armored personnel carriers, bulldozers and infantry, to the area of Marun Al Ras inside Lebanese territory. The IDF advanced from that area north toward Bint Jubayl, and south towards Yarun." This raises a couple of questions: 1) why do we still do business with the UN? and 2) why have we not expelled them from the United States? Here we have a blatent exposure of an ally's war movements and yet the Administration has yet to publicly rebuke the United Nations for this. This is also a display of the UN taking sides in the War on Terror.

The other story is from numerous sources, but this particular one is from the Washington Post. On August 24, 2006 there was a House Intelligence Committee report released saying that the US has not done a sufficient job of gathering evidence about Iran's biological, chemical and nuclear capability. Though many people in Washington have little doubt that Iran is seeking to aquire nuclear weapons, it cannot be concretely substantiated for the case of a similar operation that took place in Iraq. Furthermore, the report also raises doubts of Iran's dealings with al Qaeda. Iran is the number one state sponsor of terrorist organizations and open source information says that they are doing everything in their power to develop nuclear weapons, but without hard intelligence the policy makers of Washington are paralized in dealing with Iran.

The reason for bringing up these supposedly non-related stories is to demonstrate the difference in our ability to gain information about the enemy versus their ability to get information about us and our allies. Thanks to ideological splits in the Western world and the desire for the Left in this country to regain power, the terrorists just need to wait for information that they need to be leaked to a newspaper or wait for a liberal European working in the UN to publish it on a website. Our intelligence community is still being hampered by policies put in place during the 90's. There is also a cabal of Clinton appointees in high positions of power within the intelligence community that are seeking to harm the Bush Administration and President Bush for partisan gain. If we are to win this War on Terror, President Bush needs to find who these people are and fire them with people who can put their partisan feelings aside and recruit people who are dedicated to securing the United States from future terrorist attacks that will be on a greater scale than 9/11.