Oh please! Andrew Sullivan has a post today on the debate over the administration’s bogus or exaggerated intelligence estimates. He notes a recent article by Slate’s Fred Kaplan. “Slate’s Fred Kaplan,” he says, “also argues that the discrepancy between what we believed Saddam possessed and what we have so far found is best explained by the usual vagaries of intelligence assessments, not unlike the ‘missile gap’ of 1960.”
I’m sorry but that’s just too misleading a summary of what Kaplan said. What he described is a pattern one sometimes sees in how policy-makers use, or rather misuse, intelligence data. Sometimes politicians or military people believe so deeply that something is true (they just know it) 
that they start ignoring all the evidence that contradicts their belief and glomming on to every bit of data that confirms it.
Sometimes they’re just so sure it’s true that they’ll even start fiddling with the facts a bit just to make sure you don’t come away from the presentation with any doubts about how right they are. Zeal can become the hand-maiden of self-deception and even outright deception — and like that hot place you’ve heard about the road to get there is paved with good intentions.
Chris Nelson, of The Nelson Report, has come up with the best word for it: faith-based intelligence analysis.
(By all means, do not take my word for it: read Kaplan’s piece and make your own call.)
By and large, I think this is what happened. I also think there were at least a few cases where they bulldozed right over the line into simply telling the American public things they flat-out knew weren’t true. But I’d say most of it was willful ignorance and in some cases a reckless disregard for the truth.
I’ve had people write in and say to me: if the administration was really lying about the WMD, why weren’t they smart enough to plant some stuff for themselves to find and avoid the current embarrassment? And my answer is that I think they were as surprised as anyone to come up empty-handed. Really surprised. I think they knew the Niger uranium documents were bogus. But they figured there’d at least be plenty of chemicals and biologicals to go around once they got there.
In any case, what I think Kaplan was talking about was something quite different from the “usual vagaries of intelligence assessments.”
Just speaking for myself, what I think it really comes down to is this: does it make it okay to have hoodwinked the American people, if you hoodwinked yourself in the process?
