Usually I avoid this topic when blogging, but here is some rare common sense, combined with a sense of balance. My favorite passage:
“Intelligence failure was inevitable given the nature of the Iraqi regime. The new conventional wisdom is that Hussein wanted us to think he had a more advanced WMD program than he thought he had, and that Hussein himself thought he had a more advanced WMD program than he really had. If Hussein could be deceived in a country where he had absolute power, where he regularly punished betrayers by slipping them through human shredders or having their wives raped in front of them, then any external intelligence service was going to be deceived as well. The intelligence community accurately reported that Hussein was hiding things, that he was pursuing WMD programs, that senior members of the Iraqi military-industrial complex were convinced Iraq was pursuing WMD. Given Iraq’s record, it would have been heroic to connect those dots into the picture we now think we see, namely, that it was mostly Iraqi actors deceiving each other and everyone else.”
Read the whole analysis. I don’t mean that this argument should excuse the numerous intelligence failures, and failures of political courage, that occurred on this issue. It does mean, however, that our pre-war options were fairly limited and that simply pursuing more inspections would not have yielded much, one way or the other.
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