GLOBE EDITORIAL
Intelligence ignorancePRESIDENT BUSH delivered a devastating judgment about his own statecraft last week when he said a recent National Intelligence Estimate on likely near-term developments in Iraq was merely proposing "several scenarios that said, `life could be lousy, life could be OK, or life could be better,' and they were just guessing as to what the conditions might be like."
This remark offered a glimpse into Bush's penchant for denying reality. His later acknowledgment that he should have used the word "estimate" instead of saying the National Intelligence Council was indulging in mere guesswork hardly altered the picture he had drawn of his administration's weakness for self-delusion. A National Intelligence Estimate is based on the hard-headed assumption that a crucial forecast -- such as this summer's projection of what can be expected in Iraq from now until the end of 2005 -- cannot be foolproof; it can only be constructed from careful analyses by seasoned specialists of the best information available at the time. That's why it is called an estimate. Bush threw up a smoke screen when he retracted the phrase "just guessing." He was pretending that he had erred only by committing a slip of the lip, not by denigrating the work of the entire US intelligence community. A National Intelligence Estimate is the most sifted and formal product of the intelligence community. It offers a much sounder foundation for US policy than sheer ideological wishfulness. Regardless of what Bush wanted to say, his meaning was all too plain. He did not want to accept any of the National Intelligence Council's three projected possibilities for outcomes in Iraq over the next 15 months because there was not a rosy scenario among them. And despite what his intelligence agencies, his military, and his secretary of state have been reporting about growing terrorism and insurgency in Iraq, the president has been pretending that his own rosy scenario for that agonizing country is the most likely, if not the only, one possible. Bush's readiness to ignore warnings about unwelcome realities was demonstrated again this week in two other assessments from the prestigious National Intelligence Council. These projections of what was likely to result from a US invasion to topple Saddam Hussein were presented to policy makers in January 2003, two months before the war. They foresaw a boon to radical Islamists, a risk of internecine conflicts among Iraqis, and the likelihood of an insurgency that combined diehard Ba'athists, Iraqi Islamists, and foreign jihadis.
This was the best estimate distilled from all 15 US intelligence agencies. They were right; Bush guessed wrong. © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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