Failure

Failure:

The New York Times reports today that Hezbollah is training the Mahdi Army, according to a 'senior American intelligence official.'

Well, we've had rumors in the media mill about Hezbollah acting in Iraq all along. Michael Ledeen had this back in 2003:

Anyone who has worked on terrorism for the past 20 years will recognize the murderous techniques employed in the most-recent monster bombings at the Jordanian embassy, the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, and the shrine of Ali in Najaf. They all bear the imprint of Hezbollah's infamous chief of operations, Imad Mughniyah, the same man who organized the terrible mass murders at the U.S. Marine barracks....

Mughniyah — who has changed his face, his fingerprints, and his eye color, since he knows he's one of the most-hunted men on earth — has been in Iraq for several weeks....

[T]here are many Hezbollahs, one of which is now growing in Iraq, under the leadership of the young Sheikh Muqtada al-Sadr, who was named chief of Iraqi Hezbollah by Iran's strongman Mohammed Hashemi Rafsanjani several months ago. And, as luck would have it, the young sheikh just happened to be absent from Friday prayers at the shrine of Ali when the car bombs went off.

Was it true then? Probably? Not at all? How about in 2004?

Although American officials have called attention to the presence of about a hundred Hezbollah members in Iraq, few believe that they are organizing violent resistance. Every Hezbollah official I spoke to vehemently denied such reports, some indicating that they would welcome diplomatic relations with the United States.

The source there is Adam Shatz, writing in the New York Review of Books.

So, was Hezbollah in Iraq or not? Are they working with our enemies, bringing their advanced lessons on guerrilla warfare -- or just doing social welfare work? Did they have to do with the 2003 bombing at the Shrine of Ali mosque, or not? Are they even there now, or not?

Consider the take from Talking Points Memo.

Is it true? Is Hezbollah training the Mahdi Army? I have no idea. And regrettably, under current management, the fact that senior intelligence officials or senior administration officials say it, really doesn't mean much one way or another.

That is factually correct. If we -- and by "we" I mean both sides of the political divide in America -- have learned anything in the last few years, it's that leaks from unnamed sources in the government can't be trusted. For that matter, plain statements from the government can't be trusted to be reliable: from the CIA's "slam dunk" leadership to Colin Powell's presentation before the UN, the details of which appear to have been earnestly believed and largely wrong.

Intelligence work means getting things wrong sometimes, because you're playing the odds. It's a form of gambling, in which you never have the complete picture -- like with poker, where you know the content of your own hand but not the content of others'. Even in stud poker, where you have partial information about the latter, you end up having to gamble because some information is hidden. Sometimes, even the wisest gamble will result in a loss.

But this culture of leaks, this culture of oathbreaking by officials who have sworn to keep our nation's secrets, has left us with a complete failure of trust. TPM thinks it knows the source of this leak -- Dick Cheney -- but it's just guessing. It knows no more about that for certain than it knows if Hezbollah is in Iraq. Or, if it is, what it's doing there.

Our agencies' official statements are at once undercut by internal leaks from people with agendas. Their ability to consider possibilities in a confidential manner is undercut by leaks of those documents. Intelligence is sometimes going to be wrong, but we are left wondering if it is ever right. Worse, we are left with a picture of intelligence services internally at war with themselves. How can we place confidence in even their official statements -- to say nothing of these leaks in the press?

TPM goes on to say -- I can only assume tongue-in-cheek:

Everybody's enemy's enemy is a friend. We do know the Israelis are knee-deep in Iraqi Kurdistan, right?

That's another one of the persistant rumors of the Iraq war, with Sy Hersh recycling it over and over. His sources always seem to track back to Turkey, where the government has an interest in spreading among Muslims the notion that independent Kurdistan is an Israeli puppet. But it might be true, even so -- right?

The media isn't doing better than the intelligence services seem to be. Consider Flopping Aces, which has demonstrated that a whole series of reports alleging serious atrocities in Iraq were invented in whole cloth.

The 'fog of war' is the phrase Clausewitz used to refer to the uncertainty that arises in battle. We have reached the stage at which that uncertainty has encompassed the entire war. In spite of the presence of massively-funded intelligence services, and a press that may be covering this war more intensely than any other in history, we know nothing for certain about what is going on.

A great revealation is made by a senior intelligence official in the New York Times, alleging Hezbollah is fighting alongside our enemies in Iraq. On both sides of the American divide, the response is: "Why should we believe anything you say? You, the media, or you, the leak -- or even the agencies in which the leakers serve, when even their senior officials so regularly keep no loyalty to their oaths, but forever try to undermine each other?"

If we are to succeed, in this or any war, we must address these problems. War is a test of wills. Will requires confidence. And we have no confidence, nor any cause for confidence, in the institutions that are charged with informing us. The intelligence services and the media have both failed us.