WMD Was Just the Beginning

The fly in the smear that the Bush administration is painting on the CIA for bad Iraqi WMD intelligence (apart from Bush’s honoring of George Tenet with a Presidential Medal of Freedom) is that the WMDs were only the raison d’guerre.

Even if the CIA had screwed up the WMD estimates without meddling from the White House (which I do not believe), even if every other Security Council nation believed Iraq was an imminent threat (apparently they didn’t, because they mostly stayed in the Uncoalition of the Unwilling), the rest of the intelligence on Iraq was (and remains) a failure as well.

The dozens of “decapitation” strikes meant to take out Saddam before the invasion didn’t work. The planning of the occupation didn’t work (three administrators and counting). Two years after Germany and Japan fell in WWII, American troops were not fighting insurgents and getting bombed outside of prisons. This is sheer incompetence.