EVER AND ALWAYS

The Real Intelligence Failure: What if it turns out Saddam didn't have weapons of mass destruction? (FRANCIS FUKUYAMA, August 5, 2003, Wall Street Journal)

The media has been focusing obsessively on the relatively minor issue of how an incorrect assertion about Iraq's nuclear ambitions got into the president's State of the Union speech. In doing so, it has missed the much larger issue, which is that of Iraq's missing weapons of mass destruction. The inability to locate these weapons is vastly more consequential to American credibility than the fact that the White House staff failed to vet 16 words in a single speech. The missing weapons reflect a much more fundamental institutional intelligence failure.

The source of this failure does not lie in the political agenda of this administration. The Bush people are right in saying that their estimates of WMD stockpiles were no different from the conclusions of the Clinton administration. And the latter would say, if asked, that their assessment was drawn from Unscom, the U.N. weapons inspectors who operated in Iraq from 1991-98. The intelligence failure is thus ultimately traceable to Unscom, and deeply embedded in an intelligence process that in the 1990s was biased toward overestimation of threats.

Intelligence agencies are paid to overestimate threats; that's how they keep their budgets high. Want to lower the estimates?--let the Agriculture Department estimate national security threats and tell them they can have any money we save on Defense and Intelligence in the future. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 7, 2003 8:53 AM