INTEL INCOMPETENCE
NY Post
April 5, 2005
Not surprisingly, much of the media is bellyaching over the refusal of a bi partisan presidential panel to affirm Democratic charges that pre-war intelligence on Iraq's WMD capabilities was dictated by the White House.
"We did not see any evidence of false intelligence being injected by any policymaker into the intelligence community," said federal Judge Lawrence Silberman, who co-chaired the commission with former Democratic Sen. Charles Robb.
Indeed, the commission — which included such prominent Democrats as Clinton-era White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler — concluded that: "What intelligence professionals told you [President Bush] about Saddam Hussein's [WMD] programs was what they believed. They were simply wrong."
It's become a Democratic article of faith that U.S. intelligence was more than inept — that, as Sen. Ted Kennedy puts it, "any failure in the intelligence itself is dwarfed by the administration's manipulation in making the case for war."
Sorry, Teddy, wrong again: It just didn't happen that way.
Nor is this the first panel probing intelligence failures to say so. The evidence seems abundantly clear: No one "lied" America into making war on Iraq. To the extent that WMDs were the issue, bad intelligence drove the politics.
Not the other way around.
So: Enough with the endless quest — by the Michael Moore wing of the Democratic Party — for a smoking gun on Iraq that simply isn't there. This report raises some real worries.
Confirmation that our intelligence agencies screwed up so badly, for so long, is scary enough. Worse, the report also concludes that the new intelligence-reform bill passed by Congress is failing in its objective.
Worse still, the intelligence-sharing problems that plagued U.S. spy agencies when it came to both Iraq and al Qaeda still exist.
Those are sobering estimates of U.S. capabilities, post-9/11 — issues that deserve the focus of Democrats and Republicans alike.
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