Andrea Mitchell: When You Politicize Intelligence, It Is So Self-Defeating. Just Look At Cheney And Iraq
NBC News foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell on “Washington Week” said President Donald Trump is politicizing foreign policy.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG, THE ATLANTIC, ‘WASHINGTON WEEK’ HOST: By the way, Andrea, there’s an interesting lesson here. You look at Iran’s response, it’s been a great victory over the United States, the ayatollah says from the rubble. This is what happens when governments lie to themselves. ANDREA MITCHELL, NBC NEWS: Exactly. And we saw this in Helsinki, most notably, when the president in his first term agreed with Vladimir Putin on the subject of interference in the election over his own intelligence agencies. And at the time, one of Tulsi Hubbard’s predecessors, Dan Coates, put out an immediate statement defending the intelligence community and was eventually fired. When you politicize intelligence, as David was just suggesting, it is so self-defeating, it brings me back to Curveball, who was the primary source for the Iraq war, for there being, you know, weapons of mass destruction, biological weapons in 2003. And that is what trapped the CIA at the time. And, unfortunately, the secretary of state and his testimony to the United Nations in front of the world, we were all there in February of 2003, and Secretary Powell regretted that to the day he died because he was misled. When you have intelligence that is politicized and pressured, as it was by, you know, Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, and trying to satisfy the White House, that’s what you get. You get into mistaken wars. JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, in short, it would be smart for any administration to look at recent history and say, I’m going to tell the truth to myself about what we’ve achieved. ANDREA MITCHELL: Exactly.
