Bush didn't lie, neither did anyone else...an update

[billc]

I know, this topic has been done to death and no one will change their minds...but...this just came out today...it even has a journalist from the vaunted BBC...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-03/now-we-know-bush-did-not-lie-about-wmd-in-iraq.html

A bracing challenge to this view is provided by “The Art of Betrayal,” Gordon Corera’s enthralling history of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, popularly known as MI6.

Corera, a widely respected British Broadcasting Corp. journalist with impeccable sources in the clandestine world, devotes a good deal of his narrative to the question of what went wrong in Iraq. But the wider focus is on the shadowy, yet colorful, figures who have populated the agency since the dawn of the Cold War.

Silly Theories

One of my favorite historians, Andrew Roberts, insists that Corera’s research “explodes that myth completely.” That seems to me too strong. Rather, Corera offers a nuanced perspective that should serve as corrective to some of the sillier conspiracy theories that still abound. His account is unlikely to convince all the doubters, but should be studied nonetheless for the lessons it carries -- lessons to which President Barack Obama and his administration should pay close attention.
Corera has combed available public sources, both official investigations and various memoirs, and added to it his own reporting, most of it from anonymous intelligence sources. His ironic conclusion: “Everyone, including the spies, was convinced by the intelligence that said Saddam had the weapons,” he writes. Yet “they were not sure it looked strong enough to win the argument.”
By everyone, Corera means everyone. As he reminds us, even Hans Blix, the chief United Nations arms inspector before the war, believed that Saddam Hussein had hidden weapons of mass destruction. David Kay, who led the postwar Iraq Survey Group that found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction, went into his search expecting to find the opposite. In this sense, Bush and Blair were just along for the ride.

The myth of the super-weapons, once it gained currency, could not be dispelled. Saddam’s penchant for secrecy only made matters worse: “Every general knew he did not have the special weapons but thought his counterpart down the road did.” Even in the absence of a conspiracy, the widespread belief in Iraqi duplicity created a situation in which Saddam was unable to prove a negative: “The bar for intelligence that suggested there were no weapons was far higher than for any evidence of their existence.”
After the war, it turned out that British and U.S. spies had believed their own intelligence shaky, but thought the other’s conclusions were sufficient to bolster their analysis. Both agencies were undone partly by the sacred “control principle,” holding that if Country A gives information to Country B, Country B cannot share the details with Country C without the permission of Country A.

Overall, Corera agrees with the conclusion of the British investigators: With a single exception, the intelligence wasn’t spun by the politicians. It was “simply wrong.” From the point of view of the spies, he points out, this realization is far more damaging. It means they didn’t do their jobs. And the political leaders, says Corera, “believed the intelligence they had been told about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”
Does this let the politicians off the hook? No, says Corera. The Secret Intelligence Service was worried as early as November 2001 that “Washington’s hawks already had Saddam within their sights.” Still, the British believed the most likely U.S. course would involve a bombing campaign to support an internal rebellion. When invasion became more likely, the spies simply went along.
This is not unusual. Intelligence services, he points out, exist largely as extensions of politics. One of Corera’s sources describes what he calls a “cultural weakness” of the Secret Intelligence Service: “It is all too eager to please.” Longtime Central Intelligence Agency watchers have made a similar observation.
In the case of Iraq, one issue is that there was, in effect, a deadline: It was increasingly clear that Bush and Blair meant to go to war by early 2003. Thus the intelligence agencies were faced with the need to find a way to document what they believed to be true but couldn’t quite prove. As Corera points out, the enemy of good intelligence work is often time. It can take months or years to determine whether a bit of information is even true -- longer still to figure out what it means. The faster the spies have to work, the greater the likelihood of error.