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04/02/2005: Still Self-Delusional after all....
David Ignatius (Washington Post) has this excellent piece about the failures and self-deceptions which lead to our Iraq War conflict in this piece called Fooling Ourselves."...When it came time to write the decisive National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi WMD in October 2002, the analysts took their assumptions "and swathed them in the mystique of intelligence, providing secret information that seemed to support them but was in fact nearly worthless, if not misleading." Philosophers describe this process as "reification" -- turning soft information into what appears to be hard fact....
...Spying, in the end, is about real spies. The agency's first great spymaster, Allen Dulles, made that point in his memoir, "The Craft of Intelligence," by quoting the 2,400-year-old admonition of Chinese strategist Sun Tzu: "What is called 'foreknowledge' cannot be elicited from spirits, nor from gods, nor by analogy with past events, nor from calculations. It must be obtained from men who know the enemy situation." That's precisely what America lacked in Iraq."
Karen on 04.02.05 @ 04:54 AM CST
