ongoing · Malice and Incompetence:
If you’re a journalist or a commentator or a politician and you’re getting paid for making comments in public on the war and the intelligence failure, and you haven’t read all 521 pages of this report, you’re not a scholar and you’re not a student, you’re a whore.
I haven’t read it yet. But the only intelligence failure I’m really concerned with has nothing to do with the CIA and everything to do with the trumped-up case for invading the house of cards formerly run by Saddam Hussein.
The New York Times > International > Middle East > Panel Describes Long Weakening of Hussein Army:
In a detailed discussion of Iraq’s prewar military posture, the report cites a long series of intelligence reports in the decade before the war that described a formerly potent army’s spiral of decay under the weight of economic sanctions and American military pressure.
[ . . . ]
The committee’s report implies that war opponents were essentially correct when they argued that Iraq posed little immediate threat to the United States. Before the war, those who held this view, both in Congress and at the United Nations, argued that continued containment was preferable to an invasion.
Reminds me of the fall of the Soviet Empire and the praise lavished on Ronald Reagan for bringing it about: would Iraq have fallen without the loss of 800+ soldiers and countless civilians? We’ll never know and the warheads who pursued this course will never admit it.