Amsterdan

Irony Redeux: Carney heads Iraq reconstruction

The State Department announced on January 10, 2007, that Timothy Carney, a retired Foreign Service officer who served as a senior civilian American authority in Iraq for three months in 2003, is the new coordinator for Iraq reconstruction.

Carney is no stranger to working amid political instability and conflict. After graduating from MIT in 1966 and joining the State Department, Carney, who speaks Cambodian, Thai and French, was posted to Vietnam and Cambodia during the Indochina War, and Lesotho and South Africa before the end of apartheid.


As part of a number of United Nations missions, he was the senior American on UNTAC in Cambodia from March 1992-August 1993; then in Somalia for UNOSOM II from December 1993-February 1994 (just after U.S. military's 1993 campaign to capture Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid – a period captured in Ridley Scott’s movie Black Hawk Down); and in South Africa with UNOMSA from March-June 1994 for Nelson Mandela's election.


Most significantly, Carney was Ambassador to Sudan from 1995-97 and is the last accredited U.S. Ambassador there. Why? Because, in Carney’s words, “In early 1996, CIA director John Deutch convinced Secretary of State Warren Christopher to pull U.S. diplomats out of Sudan out of fear for their safety. His anxiety was based on intelligence that implicated the Sudanese government.”


“Soon afterward,” Carney wrote in the Washington Post in June, 2002, “the CIA figured out that its analysis was wrong. A key source had either embellished or wholly fabricated information, and in early 1996 the agency scrapped more than 100 of its reports on Sudan. Did the State Department then send its diplomats back? No. The bad intelligence had taken on a life of its own.”

In the Post article Carney concludes, “Whether hunting terrorists in Afghanistan, judging the integrity of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, mediating a dispute between India and Pakistan, or contemplating the virtue of an attack on Iraq, the Bush administration has given great weight to the content of U.S. (and sometimes foreign) intelligence reports. As the United States wages war on terrorism and Congress reorganizes and bolsters U.S. intelligence agencies, the influence of intelligence on foreign and military policy will only grow.


"But American policymakers have to be intelligent about using intelligence. The story of U.S. policy in Sudan shows how bad intelligence -- or good intelligence badly used -- can damage U.S. interests. In Sudan, it confused us about political Islam, hurt our ability to intervene in the 47-year-old Sudanese civil war, and in 1996 undermined our best chance ever to capture Osama bin Laden and strangle his organization, before he was expelled from Sudan and found his way to Afghanistan.
We write from experience.”


Pity George Bush was not listening to Carney before invading Iraq and creating the mess Carney now hopes to help unwind.

Labels: Carney, Iraq, Irony, Sudan

posted by DanZ @ 9:24 AM