It is a little late, but I just ran across the article by Kenneth Pollock in the Jan/Feb issue of Atlantic Monthly. Since we are blessed by houseguests (family members from far away and too long ago), I’ll confine myself to a quick quote and a few links to previous entries.
Here are the first three paragraphs from Pollock:
“Let's start with one truth: last March, when the United States and its coalition partners invaded Iraq, the American public and much of the rest of the world believed that after Saddam Hussein's regime sank, a vast flotsam of weapons of mass destruction would bob to the surface. That, of course, has not been the case. In the words of David Kay, the principal adviser to the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), an organization created late last spring to search for prohibited weaponry, "I think all of us who entered Iraq expected the job of actually discovering deployed weapons to be easier than it has turned out to be." Many people are now asking very reasonable questions about why they were misled.
Democrats have typically accused the Bush Administration of exaggerating the threat posed by Iraq in order to justify an unnecessary war. Republicans have typically claimed that the fault lay with the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community, which they say overestimated the threat from Iraq—a claim that carries the unlikely implication that Bush's team might not have opted for war if it had understood that Saddam was not as dangerous as he seemed.
Both sides appear to be at least partly right. The intelligence community did overestimate the scope and progress of Iraq's WMD programs, although not to the extent that many people believe. The Administration stretched those estimates to make a case not only for going to war but for doing so at once, rather than taking the time to build regional and international support for military action.”
A few points of my own:
• There is little evidence that the intelligence community asked if WMD programs ever reached the final stages of testing and training by the Iraqi military.
• Cultural factors played a major role in preventing discrepant information from flowing up the chain of command.
• Pollock suggests that it was the Neocons, particularly Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, who overestimated the WMD threat.
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