The Warped Mirror: History lessons yet to be learned

The recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear capabilities prompted many commentators to conclude that the US intelligence community was trying to learn the lessons from its failure to accurately assess Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. However, the question is of course whether the right lessons were learned - or, as the Washington Post's "Fact Checker" columnist put it bluntly: "The history of the CIA is littered with spectacular intelligence mistakes. Sometimes, the correction of one error can lead to a new error, as analysts atone for past mistakes by moving too far in the opposite direction."

This debate reminded me of the research I did for my Ph.D thesis about the work of the CIA's predecessor during World War II, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Back then, one of the issues intelligence analysts had to deal with was information about the fate of Europe's Jews. What becomes disturbingly obvious when you study how this information was evaluated and reported is that intelligence assessments are never produced in a political vacuum; instead, and perhaps inevitably, they are influenced by the political orientation of the analysts and their interpretation of the political and military context in which the intelligence would be relevant.

For information about the fate of Europe's Jews during World War II, this meant that intelligence analysts were wary of reports that seemed to echo the horror stories that had been circulated about German soldiers during World War I. Moreover, some of the leading analysts in the OSS were leftwing German-Jewish intellectuals who, drawing on their academic work, tended to interpret Nazi anti-Semitism in largely functional terms as just one of many repressive measures designed to cement Hitler's grip on power. There was also an acute awareness that within the context of the war, the fate of Europe's Jews was just a minor concern for military and political decision-makers.

Thus, in April 1943, a planned report on the "Current Status of the Jews of Europe" was postponed due to the already heavy workload of the analyst who had been assigned to cover the subject. And even in late August 1944, when reports from areas conquered by the advancing Soviet army indicated that millions had been killed, analysts insisted on reservations by noting: "While it was hardly doubted that the Nazis were determined to carry out their anti-Jewish plans, information upon the development of this policy was restricted to vague reports emanating usually from questionable sources."

The threat posed by Iran's nuclear ambitions seems for many Israelis, and many Jews, comparable to the one once posed by the Nazis. The fear that another Holocaust might be looming was most powerfully expressed in an essay published by the Israeli historian Benny Morris at the beginning of this year, but as some of the reactions by liberal commentators made clear, giving expression to such fears is not necessarily considered legitimate.

Many would perhaps also fail to understand that one of history's most gruesome lessons is very much on the mind of Israel's military elites. As Yossi Klein Halevi reported recently, a letter circulated among Israeli Air Force officers presented "a textual comparison between quotes from Hitler threatening Europe's Jews in the 1930s with quotes from Iranian President Ahmadinejad threatening Israel today. An accompanying letter, signed by an officer identified only as 'responsible for the Iranian arena', noted laconically, 'We can rely only on ourselves.'"

Indeed, if the recently published intelligence estimate on Iran provided ample reason to doubt that intelligence analysts have learned from history, there is equally much reason to doubt that political commentators have learned a whole lot. Just last month, the British newspaper The Guardian made its archives available in digital format and marked the occasion with an article by the historian Sir Ian Kershaw, who documented that the paper' commentators grossly misjudged Hitler and the Nazi movement in the early 1930s. Kershaw's article was also posted on the Engage website, where several readers commented on the striking similarities between the media coverage of the Nazis back then, and the media coverage of radical Islamists nowadays.

Among Kershaw's most disturbing observations is that even in spring 1932, Hitler was still described as "a 'moderate', who might possibly develop into a statesman, but could not control his own violent and unruly movement." Moreover, there was also a tendency to dismiss the threat posed by the Nazis' anti-Semitism -as one report in March 1932 noted, there was reason to believe that warnings about Hitler's anti-Semitism exaggerated the danger, because, as was pointed out: "It must not be forgotten that the major part of the German Republican Press is in Jewish hands."

Only when Hitler was appointed as Reich chancellor in January 1933, the Guardian was prepared to suggest that this was "an hour which may prove a turning point in the history of post-war Germany". They got it right too late.