Four years ago, on 24 February 2022, the Russian military began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, having already occupied Crimea since 2014. Tensions between Ukraine’s government and western leaders on one side and the Kremlin on the other had been escalating for years, but war did not seem like a foregone conclusion, at least not to key European politicians and even to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president.
Zelenskyy hadn’t even packed an emergency suitcase, though talk of war was everywhere. All that changed at 4.50am that Thursday morning. Russian missiles rained down on the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, and Russian troops invaded the eastern flank of the country on three different fronts. Zelenskyy and his family fled to an undisclosed location amid threats of Russian assassination squads. What has become the largest war on European soil since the second world war, what Putin has blandly called a “special military operation”, had begun.
Was the onset of this war a surprise? We now know, thanks to a deeply reported article by the Guardian’s central and eastern Europe correspondent, Shaun Walker, that both the CIA and MI6 had amassed troves of deep intelligence about the impending war and were issuing dire notices to their allies about the inevitability of an invasion by Putin. Those warnings were all but ignored in key European capitals. Why? In large part because US and British intelligence were considered untrustworthy after the extraordinary intelligence debacle in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Walker’s reporting cites a “heated” conversation between an unnamed European foreign minister and Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state at the time. “I’m old enough to remember 2003,” the foreign minister informs Blinken, “and back then I was one of those who believed you.” John Foreman, then Britain’s defence attache in Russia, is also quoted. “The reluctance to trust us was definitely a legacy of Iraq,” he said, explaining: “If you’re showing people things and they still don’t believe you, you’ve got a problem.”
We should pause to remember exactly what this means. In the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, US and British intelligence services prioritized pleasing their political leaders over gathering certifiable facts. Iraq, as we also now know, did not possess weapons of mass destruction, the reason cited hundreds of times by George W Bush and his top officials for going to war. (The Center for Public Integrity counted at least 935 false statements made in the two years following September 11 by Bush and his top officials regarding the supposed threat Saddam Hussein posed to the national security of the United States.) But the intelligence agencies kept telling us that Iraq had them.
In 2005, an official government commission assessing this failure reached the damning conclusion we all by then knew. “The Intelligence Community was dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction,” the commission wrote. By 2008, the National Security Archive at George Washington University was analyzing documents regarding the war. “The U.S. intelligence community buckled sooner in 2002 than previously reported to Bush administration pressure for data justifying an invasion of Iraq,” they discovered. “The public relations push for war came before the intelligence analysis.”
The British government was also culpable in the subterfuge. In fact, according to the National Security Archive, “the Bush administration and the Tony Blair government began acting in concert to build support for an invasion of Iraq” through deliberately skewed intelligence about “two to three months earlier than previously understood”. And who can forget how MI6 began suspecting a covert source only when the source’s description of an Iraqi chemical weapons device was basically identical to one in the Hollywood movie The Rock? This was but one of the shocking findings in the Chilcot report, a piercing public inquiry into the UK government’s involvement in Iraq from 2001 to 2009.
The result of all this high-level deception was not only the catastrophe of war for the people of Iraq and the greater Middle East, but also the complete loss of credibility for the US and UK intelligence services. More importantly and as I’ve written previously, this period – and not the era of Donald Trump – marks the real beginning of our “post-truth” era.
So it’s no wonder that European leaders, who also naively believed that Putin wouldn’t possibly risk the lives of his troops and the reputation of his country, would fail to trust the United States or the United Kingdom. That both the CIA and MI6 came with loads of real actionable intelligence to European leaders, at which they yawned, ultimately says less about western European policy mistakes and much more about the long arc of consequences unleashed on the world by the US’s neocolonial adventurism.
American intelligence assessments also believed that Russia’s march to Kyiv would resemble a blitzkrieg, leading to a quick Russian takeover and requiring a Ukrainian government fighting from exile. So while the agency may have been correct in its appraisal of the launching of war, it has proved incredibly wrong in how that war has played out. Combat in Ukraine drags on in a cynical war of attrition, with reportedly more than 1 million dead and many millions more displaced. Today, Russia controls only about 13% more of Ukraine’s territory since 2022. The end of fighting does not seem imminent.
Would this terrible situation be any different had the Europeans heeded US and UK intelligence? Possibly, though speculating about alternative realities is always a fraught enterprise. The more important takeaway is a simpler one: you can’t attempt to dupe the world for years and then expect people to take you seriously. Among allies, reputations must be built on credibility and not merely on power. Every loss of credibility is a loss of power. And only a fool thinks credibility can be regained through force.
These are the lessons that we all should be paying attention to, especially as the United States seems dead set on launching a new war (among other new wars) on Iran for its nuclear program, even if we were told by the US president last June, after the US and Israel attacked the sovereign nation, that US intelligence determined that the US had “obliterated Iran’s nuclear facilities”. What Trump is really relaying to us is that the intelligence services don’t matter.
And that’s the inevitable result from Bush to Trump. We’ve gone from a world run by bad intelligence to a world run by no intelligence. And the people of Ukraine, among so many others, are the one paying the price for the incredible, reckless stupidity of our leaders.
Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York
