\u201cThe Story\u201d provides a fascinating perspective on a terrible period.\u00a0 For those who want to look at the Iraq mess from various angles, this will add a valuable perspective (she quotes me in it, so I may not be unbiased).<\/p>\n
There have been harsh comments about Judy Miller\u2019s reporting, but the intelligence community did no better–as has been acknowledged publicly. The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of October 2002 has now been largely declassified.\u00a0 This was the baseline document for Congress and the Administration regarding the decision to go to war.\u00a0 It was awful.\u00a0 Now it serves as an example of how not to create intelligence assessments. And, the intelligence community has taken many steps to improve its collection, analytic process and intelligence products in the aftermath.\u00a0 But don’t think there won’t be future intelligence “failures.”\u00a0 It’s inevitable.<\/p>\n
Journalists face many of the same problems as intelligence officers–vetting sources, not getting locked in on a single hypothesis, checking your assumptions, reviewing all the sources of bias that seep into analysis, etc, etc, etc.\u00a0 For both journalists and intelligence officers Iraq was a tough problem.<\/p>\n
There was little data.\u00a0 Defectors were wobbly and hard to check. (Curveball was only the most famous fabricator).\u00a0 And the mindset was, given Saddam’s history, why wouldn\u2019t he have WMD?\u00a0 Chemical weapons saved him (by offsetting Iranian \u201chuman wave attacks\u201d) in the Iran-Iraq war in the 80’s.\u00a0 Later, in the 1991 Kuwait war, Saddam believed his WMD stocks saved him again by deterring George Bush the elder, from going to Baghdad.\u00a0 Add to those two facts, the years of Saddam’s playing cat and mouse with UN inspectors (91-96 or so), and it is understandable that intelligence analysts were not postulating that Saddam had finally given everything up.<\/p>\n
In the absence of evidence, but with the requirement, nevertheless, to make a judgment for policymakers, giving Saddam Hussein the benefit of the doubt was improbable.<\/p>\n
Of course the assessments were mostly wrong, especially on Nuclear where they were way off the mark–embarrassingly so.\u00a0 The other assessments (CW, BW, and ballistic missiles) lacked caveats and qualifications that misled readers to assume there was real data underlying the judgments.\u00a0 As Ms. Miller\u2019s account relates, journalists did not do much better.<\/p>\n
It’s worth recalling that the UN weapons inspectors also found it impossible to give Saddam a clean bill of health.\u00a0 Obviously the consequences of their judgments were not the same as the US intelligence community.\u00a0 However, their work formed the basis for many key assessments.\u00a0 And the weapons inspectors were certainly unconvinced that Saddam had come clean.\u00a0 In fact, they delineated the areas where Saddam had not provided verifiable accounts of his WMD activities.\u00a0 And the substantial gaps in his story were more readily explained by \u201chidden WMD\u201d than he innocently \u201cforgot how much he had or where it went.\u201d<\/p>\n
From Ms. Miller’s description, it also seems the ugly bureaucratic fights in the government bureaucracy (e.g. between State and Defense) had their counterparts inside the NY Times. The friction between management and staff is quite similar.\u00a0 So too were the slippery responses by management when things go wrong.<\/p>\n
The circumstances leading to the war were not simple.\u00a0 Quite the contrary.\u00a0 For those who already have their minds made up (\u201cBush lied and People died\u201d) and do not want any contrary evidence, perhaps this is not for you.\u00a0 However, if you are inclined to build on your background this book adds a lot.\u00a0 I would expect journalism students would find it on future syllabi.<\/p>\n
As for Jon Stewart, he certainly expounds a point of view.\u00a0 And he knows his audience.\u00a0 He gives them what they want to hear.\u00a0 Maybe he should become the head of the CIA in his next job.\u00a0 He’d be better than some and worse than others.\u00a0 But, I suspect he will run for congress (Senate) next.\u00a0 Those jobs’ are more in line with his talent.\u00a0 And maybe the hearings would be even more comical.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cThe Story\u201d provides a fascinating perspective on a terrible period.\u00a0 For those who want to look at the Iraq mess from various angles, this will add a valuable perspective (she quotes me in it, so I may not be unbiased). … Continue reading