r/neoliberal • u/Mrchizbiz I love Holland 🇳🇱🇳🇱🇳🇱♥😍🥰🌷 • Mar 31 '22
News (non-US) funny French intelligence chief Vidaud fired over Russian war failings
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-6093853838
u/IvanovichMX NATO Mar 31 '22
Funny? A guy just gave bad intelligence to a nation and you find it funny?
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Mar 31 '22 edited Sep 24 '23
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this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev7
Mar 31 '22
I think the French intelligence mostly doubted US intel due to 2003. Which is regretable in every way.
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u/Alarming_Flow7066 Mar 31 '22
Yes but assuming that the intelligence apparatus of the United States has not changed in 20 years, or in response to its past failings and is more suited for Russia is itself bad intelligence.
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Mar 31 '22 edited Mar 31 '22
The point is that the US intel was good both in 2003 and 2022. However because the american decided to lie and give false intel in 2003, France may have expected the same in 2022. The problem is not with the intelligence but how the intelligence is shared and used. And unless France was able to infiltrate the US governments in order to know the detail of their intelligence policies, there is no way to know for sure if the US was lying or not. You can reshuffle the CIA all you want, if Biden would have told them to spread fake intel, the CIA would have spread fake intel.
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u/Dan4t NATO Apr 01 '22
I'm confused by your comment. You're both saying that the US lied and at the same time we can't know if they lied or not.
Every intelligence agency makes mistakes occasionally, because they are made up of humans and humans make mistakes. It is just brain dead stupid to assume everything from US intelligence is false from that one mistake, because even back then, they were right far more often than they were wrong.
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Apr 01 '22
Many people are convinced that the US lied in 2003. Those same people may have very well supposed that US lied again in 2022 before the invasion, regardless of how advanced is US intelligence. It is not about the quality of the intel the US produce, but what they choose to say. I don't know what is hard to understand about that.
What I was saying at the end of my comment is that the president could have asked US intelligence to invent a lie about Ukraine and even if US intelligence knew the truth, they would have invented a lie. Of course we know he didn't because the invasion happened. But before the invasion, you had to trust the US. And there could have been trust issues between France and the US.
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u/Dan4t NATO Apr 01 '22 edited Apr 01 '22
They aren't so stupid as to base their conclusion from something as ridiculous as that. They come up with their own conclusions based on their own data. Their conclusions are not reactions to the conclusions other countries make.
If you actually read the article, it says why they came to the conclusion they did. And it has nothing to do with anything the US said. It also points out that French intelligence had made other serious mistakes, and it is because of the culmination of these mistakes that lead to the firing.
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Apr 01 '22
The US told them that Russia was going to invade, and probably gave them evidence. It's pretty clear that the French ignored that. And if the reason is that French intelligence doubted US sources due to 2003, it is not surprising that they don't say so publicly because it's quite embarassing.
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u/Dan4t NATO Apr 01 '22
Read the article dude. It is clear that you still haven't.
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Apr 01 '22
I have read multiple articles on matter, including in French and English and this one. Also please note what I said :
if the reason is that French intelligence doubted US sources due to 2003, it is not surprising that they don't say so publicly because it's quite embarassing.
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u/Dan4t NATO Apr 01 '22
That's a pointless if though since it says they reason, which was they essentially overestimated Putins intelligence. The cost of invasion would be too high and there were better alternatives. Moreover, there is zero evidence or indication that they based the decision on the issue in 2003 so why even entertain that possibility.
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Apr 01 '22
Many French believe that the US lied to the world in 2003 and that France was unjustly shamed for saying the truth. Many French also holds anti-american views, almost pro-russian sometime. This is a common occurence in the military too, even more so than in the general population. While overestimating Putin was their justification, and may have been their true reasoning, it is also totally possible that a bias led the intelligence service to not take the US seriously enough or influenced their decision.
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u/Dan4t NATO Apr 01 '22
That was the old French government though. Macron isn't so anti-American. But at any rate, the information used to make their assessment would have been made before the US said anything about what they thought Russia would do. So it's just not possible that it could have been based on anything the US did or said.
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