Dean's World

A just-released Senate report slams the CIA for its pre-Iraq-war intelligency — saying estimates of Sadaam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction were devastatingly wrong and unjustified.

The news story:

Pre-war estimates of Saddam Hussein's armament were incorrect and unjustified, considering the facts known then, a highly critical U.S. Senate report indicates.

The committee's chairman, Republican Pat Roberts, slammed CIA conclusions drawn before the war about the threat posed by Mr. Hussein's supposed arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.

"Today we know these assessments were wrong. ... They were also unreasonable and unsupported," he told reporters in Washington on Friday.

He pulled no punches in his criticism, saying that the intelligence failure was "one of the most devastating" in U.S. history.

The report comes more than a year after the United States led a multinational force into Iraq to topple Mr. Hussein. The ostensible reason for the war - cited repeatedly by U.S. President George W. Bush - was the threat that weapons of mass destruction could pose in the hands of a dictator who hated the United States and had waged aggressive war in the past.

No such weapons have been found in Iraq. As the months passed, optimism among those backing the war has waned.

In recent weeks British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who sent thousands of troops to Iraq, acknowledged that these weapons, if they still exist, may never be found.

Former CIA director George Tenet resigned last month. He leaves office this week.

The full transcript of the press conference can be found here.

OUR MODEST VIEW:

(1) It's good that Tenet is gone. He lasted in that post far longer than he should have lasted. If you read various recent accounts, he almost seemed to be the Eddy Haskell of the Bush Administration.

(To totally date myself — and I hate dating myself because I reject me — if you don't know who Eddy Haskell was, he was the notorious adult-brown-nosing kid on the classic 50s-60s TV show Leave It To Beaver, which still lives on in cable re-runs).

(2) The report shows a potentially fatal flaw in one of the most VITAL functions of the CIA — an issue that has become almost totally devoured by the political spinsters in the election frenzy to score points (and win votes) for their side:

--DEMOCRATS have insisted weapons of mass destruction was virtually the only justification for the war. Not true. It was a KEY justification for the war but other justifications were given as well. These other arguments may not have sold the war if the wmd were not in the mix...but other compelling reasons were indeed given as well. Many Democrats are now trying to re-write history.

--REPUBLICANS now try to downplay the way the administration used the wmd argument. It was a BIG justification and was the main reason Democratic politicos went along with the administration, out of fear of being soft on national security since it was argued these weapons were posing a threat to the U.S. homeland.The administration made a full-court-press on the war issue right before Congressional elections. The issue of national security is and was a vital one — but many Republicans are now trying to re-write history.

Forget about politics (impossible??) for a minute. The report suggests that this was such a monumental CIA intelligence failure that any failure now by ANY administration or Congressional committees to fix it quickly will be negligence. Suppose bad CIA intelligence led to a war where nuclear weapons were used by both sides? There would be no second chances then (at least not for many years, until the radioactive material cleared away).