The Week

Sandy Berger walked out of the National Archives with sensitive documents stuffed in his pants. What is it with Democrats and their trouser problems?

So much for “Bush lied.” Two reports have debunked claims that Bush and Blair deliberately exaggerated pre-war intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan report absolved the Bush administration of coercing analysts to inflate their judgments; Lord Butler’s committee cleared the Blair administration. But the Senate report scathingly and appropriately criticized the intelligence community’s failure to obtain and accurately report information. Once U.N. inspectors were expelled in 1998, the West was essentially bereft of human intelligence sources in Iraq. U.S. intelligence nevertheless continued to draw inferences from aging information, portraying ever-more tenuous deductions as reliable fact. Saddam was a threat. It was reasonable to think that he stepped up WMD efforts when the inspectors left, and that his refusal to account for his arsenal camouflaged existing stockpiles. But this surmise, as the Senate committee concluded, was a “hypothesis in search of evidence.” There were understandable difficulties in getting an accurate intelligence picture in Iraq—even Saddam’s generals thought he had WMD. And it is foolish to think intelligence will ever be perfect. But a flaccid intelligence culture that has given armchair conjecture primacy over the grunt work of data collection and searching analysis is a serious national-security problem. It will not be addressed by yet another layer of bureaucracy or a new CIA director whose chief attribute is being readily confirmable in today’s poisonous environment. It will take dynamic leadership at the top, determined to revitalize the ethos of American intelligence—and a political culture that is willing to tolerate agents who take risks and, yes, occasionally go wrong.

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Sandy Berger walked out of the National Archives with sensitive documents stuffed in his pants. What is it with Democrats and their trouser problems?

So much for “Bush lied.” Two reports have debunked claims that Bush and Blair deliberately exaggerated pre-war intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan report absolved the Bush administration of coercing analysts to inflate their judgments; Lord Butler’s committee cleared the Blair administration. But the Senate report scathingly and appropriately criticized the intelligence community’s failure to obtain and accurately report information. Once U.N. inspectors were expelled in 1998, the West was essentially bereft of human intelligence sources in Iraq. U.S. intelligence nevertheless continued to draw inferences from aging information, portraying ever-more tenuous deductions as reliable fact. Saddam was a threat. It was reasonable to think that he stepped up WMD efforts when the inspectors left, and that his refusal to account for his arsenal camouflaged existing stockpiles. But this surmise, as the Senate committee concluded, was a “hypothesis in search of evidence.” There were understandable difficulties in getting an accurate intelligence picture in Iraq—even Saddam’s generals thought he had WMD. And it is foolish to think intelligence will ever be perfect. But a flaccid intelligence culture that has given armchair conjecture primacy over the grunt work of data collection and searching analysis is a serious national-security problem. It will not be addressed by yet another layer of bureaucracy or a new CIA director whose chief attribute is being readily confirmable in today’s poisonous environment. It will take dynamic leadership at the top, determined to revitalize the ethos of American intelligence—and a political culture that is willing to tolerate agents who take risks and, yes, occasionally go wrong.