INTELLIGENCE….Just a quick followup about Andrew Sullivan’s comment yesterday that “our intelligence caused Bush and Blair to commit extraordinary errors in front of the entire world.”
It’s ironic, isn’t it? The CIA spent most of the 80s issuing dire warning about Soviet strength, warnings that we now know were completely wrong. By the time Reagan came to office, the Soviet Union was already teetering on the economic edge, and the CIA was completely off base about both their economic and military strength.
This embarrassed them, and so by the 90s they had rightfully decided to be more cautious in their assessments. Then came 9/11, and the Pentagon, having decided that the CIA was now just a bunch of analysis-paralysis weenies, set up the Office of Special Plans to take a more aggressive look at intelligence data.
Well, now it looks like the OSP was wrong about Saddam’s WMD, but who’s getting the flack? The CIA.
These guys just can’t win, can they?
(And while we’re on the subject, am I the only lefty who finds it a bit disconcerting that I sort of feel sorry for the CIA these days…?)
