Scott Ritter has the
argument we should all be paying attention to as this question of "intelligence
failure" comes to the fore.
Here is a key passage:
The fact, independent of the findings of any commission, is that not everyone was wrong.
I, for one, was not. I did my level best to demand facts from the Bush administration to back up their allegations regarding Iraq's WMD and, failing that, spoke out and wrote in as many forums as possible in an effort to educate the publics of the United States and the world about the danger of going to war based on a hyped-up threat.
In this I was not alone. Rolf Ekeus, the former head of the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq, has declared that under his direction, Iraq was "fundamentally disarmed" as early as 1996. Hans Blix, who headed UN weapons inspections in Iraq in the months before the invasion in March 2003, stated that his inspectors had found no evidence of either WMD or WMD-related programs in Iraq. And officials familiar with Iraq, like Ambassador Joseph Wilson and State Department intelligence analyst Greg Theilmann, both exposed the unsustained nature of the Bush claims regarding Iraq's nuclear capability.
The riddle surrounding Iraq's WMD was solvable without resorting to war. For all the layers of deceit and obfuscation, there existed enough basic elements of truth and substantive fact about the disposition of Saddam Hussein's secret weapons programs to permit the Gordian knot to be cleaved by anyone willing to try. But there was no predisposition on the part of those assigned the task of solving the riddle to do so.
As others have put it, the Iraq war was neither an intelligence failure (as we are now calling it) nor a "failure of diplomacy" (as Bush, Cheney Powell and Blair tried to call it when the UN failed to pass a war resolution) but an enormous political success.
The failure was one of political will (of the formal political opposition in the US) and one of human decency (of the Bush Administration's leadership).
Its time to recast this issue, since the politics is all in the framing.