When liars lie and cheater cheat - intel "failure"

The New York Times > Washington > Panel's Report Assails C.I.A. for Failure on Iraq Weapons:
"But in retrospect, those assumptions by American and other intelligence analysts turned out to be deeply flawed, even though some of Mr. Hussein's own commanders said after they were captured in 2003 that they also believed the government held some unconventional weapons. It was a myth Mr. Hussein apparently fostered to retain an air of power."

As I have said consistently on this subject, on any reasonable basis, it would have been nothing short of miraculous if our CIA, DIA and NSA had acheived a full and fair assessment of Iraq's capabilities and intentions in the last years of Saddam Hussein's regime. After all, the British and French, who have been active in the region even longer than we have, appear to have come to roughly the same conclusions we did. Even the Russians, who should have had excellent sources based on their role as Iraq's leading arms supplier, did not dispute the Western consensus on Iraq's weapons programs.

This NYTimes report goes on to say: "One issue the commission grappled with is whether the intelligence agencies failed to understand what was happening inside Iraq after the inspectors left in 1998, a period that David Kay, the first head of the Iraq Survey Group, referred to last year as a time when the country headed into a 'vortex of corruption.' Mr. Kay, who also testified before the commission, said Mr. Hussein's scientists had faked some of their research and development programs, and Mr. Hussein was reported by his aides to be increasingly divorced from reality."

This makes my point clearly. If even senior Iraqi military commanders could believe that some of these claimed weapons and weapons programs were real, and if scientists were being paid to work on them and were submitting reports indicating progress was being made, on what basis would we have justified dismissing the likelihood that such weapons and R&D programs existed?

Now, it is true that this study does raise disturbing questions about how well we know what we think we know about the capabilities and intentions of Iran, North Korea, Al Qaeda, and other nations and groups of concern to us and our allies. Similar questions were raised when the old Soviet Union split up and we found that many of our intel assessments had given too much credit to the Soviets. There are several reasons why such things happen: (1) while hiding the specifics, the adversary wishes to appear more formidable in terms of capabilities to deter enemies and more pacific in terms of intentions to discourage pre-emption; (2) bureaucracies in intel, like other bureaucracies, do not grow in power and influence by announcing that problems have been solved or never existed; (3) reluctance to admit past errors even when they become apparent means that new capabilities which may be real get added to old ones that weren't and vice versa; (4) it's hard to get hurt by over-estimating your enemies and very easy to get hurt under-estimating them.