Who is Richard H. Immerman?
02.23.2008 - 8:24 AMIs this a case of the fox guarding the henhouse?
Immerman is the man Mike McConnell, director of national intelligence, appointed back in September to the position of “assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analytic integrity and standards.” Immerman also holds the position of “analytic ombudsman.”
Immerman’s job is to ensure that intelligence reports are created according to accepted norms and are vetted properly for accuracy and lack of bias. He also investigates complaints by others of shortcomings in the production of intelligence analyses.
But before assuming this position, Immerman was a professor at Temple University, where he adumbrated some views that make him a peculiar choice for a position of such high responsibility. I explore them — and their possible connection to the recent botched National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s WMD program — in If Michael Moore Had a Security Clearance, which appears in the latest issue of the Weekly Standard.
Here are the questions of the day:
How exactly did someone of Immerman’s particular political persuasion come to hold such a critical position in the intelligence community?
Will Mike McConnell keep him in his job?
What do readers of Connecting the Dots predict?
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February 23rd, 2008 at 8:00 PM
Why would McConnell fire him? As Director of National Intelligence, he’s obviously more concerned with covering his own @$$ than providing accurate intelligence, and Immerman helps him do that.
McConnell wasn’t fired after he allowed that outrageous NIE to be released, so why should he worry about President Bush ever firing him? Bush will be gone come January.
If McConnell wants to keep his job after Bush is gone, it helps to ingratiate himself in advance with the next administration. If Obama or Clinton are elected, having a hyper leftist like Immerman in place vetting intelligence reports along party lines would win him brownie points. (Just like presiding over the last NIE did.)
If McCain is elected, McConnell could play off his sympathies for a fellow Navy vet. He could also blame his agency’s lousy performance and blatant attempts to set policy on underlings like Immerman, even though he’s the one who appointed him.
If I can figure this stuff out, McConnell sure as Hell can. McConnell is a career bureaucrat, and like most career bureaucrats he puts his own desires before his country’s by playing it safe and trying to preserve his career.
February 23rd, 2008 at 9:40 PM
Well, it’s in keping with the likes of Michael Scheuer at the top analytical levels of the CIA. His latest “Road to Hell” is so confused, it would be an exhibit on classical schizophrenia. On the
one hand, Islam in practice is evil, but don’t state any facts about it. Those who challenge
the Wahhabi lobby’s view of Israel as the ‘Phantom Menace” are American takfiri (as he refers
in a footnote to the critics of the Walt/Mearsheimer tome; mind you now, takfiri’s are the murderous liars who hide their pursuit of Wahhabi/Salafi activism under ostensibly Western
modes of behavior (re; Mohammed Atta, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, that Lebanese lad who was going to take down the PATH trains two years ago) We should kill all Islamist, however, the
likes of Hekmatyar, Raisul Sayyaf and the Taliban, should be preferred over Karzai’s group, because Western influence brings corruption and sex; all challenges to Islam. Osama’s way
is the revolution destined to succeed, but we must kill him, because. . . We should have abandoned Afghanistan like we did in the 90s, because the Taliban is preferrable to any one willing to ally with us. Consequently, we should let the Wahhabi’s win in Iraq, because that will keep Saudi Arabia, stable, right
February 23rd, 2008 at 11:47 PM
Perhaps it is just a case of the President/Vice-president following the saying–hold your enemies closer then your friends. Paraphrasing of course.
February 24th, 2008 at 1:57 AM
Taylor Branch wrote Pillar of Fire in 1999. On page 177 we find the following:
“Although (Ambassador Henry Cabot) Lodge did not work for the CIA, (President) Johnson associated him with an unfavorable image of CIA officials as mediocre dissemblers from overbred patrician families. (”Whenever those rich people have a son they can’t trust with the family brokerage,” Johnson once grumbled, “they ship him down to the CIA.”)
February 24th, 2008 at 12:29 PM
There’s a little more to it than the left-wing buzzphrases in Immerman’s “Intelligence and Strategy” article, referenced in Gabe’s well-developed piece.
Immerman, working for Fingar, is doing Fingar’s bidding. No big analytical leap there. But Immerman’s academic oeuvre focuses very much on the Eisenhower years, with an emphasis on John Foster Dulles, on intelligence, deception, and special ops as Ike used them, and on the migration of Cold War strategy under Ike to the nuclear deterrence-cum-specops model, as opposed to the conventional military confrontation favored by Truman.
I’ve actually read Immerman’s book (with Robert R. Bowie) Waging Peace, which recounts Ike’s establishment of the role of the NSC in the period 1953-54, and the decisions that led to formalizing “deterrence-based containment” as our national policy, rather than the “rollback” advocated by John Foster Dulles. While the book is notable for being dryly focused on bureaucratic machinations, it is also notable for the readiness with which its authors accept and embrace Ike’s fundamental posture of minimizing risk on all fronts.
Doing the least possible — spending the least, provoking the least overt confrontation — and accepting the probability of short term strategic losses, were the defensive hallmarks of decisionmaking principles under Ike. His political perspective was one of accepting all competing objections as boundaries (hence, Dulles formed one of the boundaries), and navigating between them. What is notable is not so much that Immerman and Bowie agree with him, but that they don’t even question the perspective, treating it very much as an obvious take on “reality” that needs no justification.
George W. Bush’s perspective in the GWOT has been the polar opposite of this one. Not for him the defensive stance, seeking methods of “deterring” terrorists: pulling back from them, drawing lines of defense and withdrawing behind them. While he has been happy to use special ops, he has NOT used them, as Ike did, in PLACE of conventional confrontation, as a means of acting more cheaply or deniably. Nor has he explicitly sought a sovereign “deterrent” to wield against the terrorists, a modern replacement for the nuclear strategic forces, and the whole separate life they took on in our relations with the USSR.
On the other hand, intelligence, in the hands of a defensive posture, can function as a sort of inverse deterrent — a trigger that, in the right hands, can remain unpulled. The nuclear threat worked out very well for the defensive-minded in America’s policy elite during the Cold War, giving them a convenient appeal against policies too conventional, decisive, and “destabilizing.” (This was why Reagan’s dramatic 1981 strategic arms reduction proposal — essentially the same one Gorbachev lobbed back at him in 1985 — and the Strategic Defense Initiative were so greatly excoriated by the policy elite. These measures both threatened the effectiveness of the elite-managed nuclear “equation” as a “stabilizing” factor across US administrations.)
I see intelligence being used in a similar way today, in the war on terror — as a means for the foreign policy establishment (which includes the civilian intelligence community) to define the outer bounds of possibility for the transient elected. Having managed to manufacture a “transgression” by Bush & Co. against this bounding agent (intelligence) in Iraq, the foreign policy establishment has the upper hand in wielding it now.
Immerman’s pedigree is deeper than thinking Bush is a twit. He’s a dyed-in-the-wool defensive-minded Morgenthau-ian “realist,” who regards intelligence as, basically, whatever it HAS to be, to put boundaries on a president’s options. In this he conforms perfectly to the views of Thomas Fingar, late of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Personal opinion: McConnell is no match for these guys.
February 24th, 2008 at 9:27 PM
J.E. Dyer,
you’re right that McConnell wont fire that seditious piece of crap Immerman, but you’re wrong to describe Immerman as a political “realist.” You’re also wrong to describe him as someone trying to restrict the President’s powers for restriction’s sake. He’s a leftist dumb@$$, pure and simple. He’s doing everything he can in his power to cram his sophomoric worldview down our throats. Like the Supreme Court, his activism is driven by ideology and authoritarianism, not some vaguely noble sense of political balance.
There isn’t any more to the man than “left-wing buzz phrases.” Those puerile buzz phrases are Holy scripture to a fanatic like Immerman, and his leftism was built on catch phrases. That, and huge body counts.
National Intelligence in America serves our enemies better than it does us. Immerman is a traitor, and so is McConnell for putting his career before the people he’s supposed to be protecting. Screw both of them.
April 18th, 2008 at 7:19 AM
[…] have already noted here and in the Weekly Standard that a fox is guarding the hen house. Richard Immerman, a far-Left […]