Pat Lang, a former high-ranking official at the Defense Intelligence Agency and a very legitimate Middle East expert, has a fantastic blog post up about the failures of intelligence in Iraq. If you're interested in why we're having such a difficult time militarily in Iraq, and especially if you like the intel details, go read the whole thing. Lang is occasionally ornery, but the whole site is well worth adding to your RSS, he's an interesting and insightful guy with provocative thoughts.
Commenting on the report that a huge amount of intelligence in Iraq is being done by private contractors, he rightly observes that the article is a little misleading in talking about "intelligence gathering" when what it really means is what he calls "scholarship," what I would simply call analysis. From there, though, he goes into a discussion of *why* intelligence operations in Iraq are going so poorly, and many of his observations are things I personally experienced or observed in Baghdad. He says:
The military command in Iraq has failed and continues to fail to do intelligence collection and analysis adequately in support of the core activities of its combat and counterinsurgency forces in the war . . .Yeah. That's a pretty significant problem.
What is the evidence of that failure? We can not find the enemy.
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