A newly released report published by the CIA rebukes the Bush administration for not paying enough attention to prewar intelligence that predicted the factional rivalries now threatening to split Iraq.
Which comes as no surprise. I'm no expert on Iraq, but even I knew enough about Arab cultures to predict that we certainly wouldn't be greeted with flowers. But this paragraph stuck out to me:
"In an ironic twist, the policy community was receptive to technical intelligence (the weapons program), where the analysis was wrong, but apparently paid little attention to intelligence on cultural and political issues (post-Saddam Iraq), where the analysis was right," they write.
This is apparently more of the white-washing premise that "The administration believed Iraq was a threat, so they couldn't take the chance." In effect, they're pinning this debacle (oh, that's such a fun word to say) on the lower-echelons of the intelligence community in a move that A Tiny Revolution has dubbed the reverse-Nuremberg defense:
It's obvious I had to order the extermination of six million Jews. My underlings had given me intelligence that they were subhumans scheming to destroy the master race.
He then goes on to explain how this 'fact'--that it was the intelligence that was wrong, not the policy--is utter nonsense.
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