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Originally Posted by mburbank
Yeah, I really don't blame him for not taking this very seriously. I mean, look what happened when he believed them about that whole Weapons of Mass Destruction thing.
Here's my question, though. If they just guess about stuff, why do we pump billions into their budget every year? I mean, hell, I can just guess, and I'd do it for say $42,000 annually.
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Y'know, I recently realized just how little I knew about what was becoming to seem to me to be the thing of primary importance in our little foray into the Middle East, so I picked up some books on the CIA. Nothing of any real substance is out yet concerning the intelligence war on terror, so I got a big history lesson, essentially.
Pretty interesting even if a bit tangental. American interest in international intrigue began with the shock of the other recent big attack on our shores: Pearl Harbor. Of potentially great help in WWII, the general idea of fielding spies was still to help us predict future attacks and major events in the world. The CIA was also relied upon heavily for WWIII, the Cold War, however they never got really good at their original purpose: prediction. In fact, their record in that department so far is about 0-(however many big things have happened since 1942.)
The CIA has yet to actually know about anything happening before it actually occurred. The WMD debacle was hardly the first snafu attributed to the CIA, and it won't be the last. I used to think, for some reason alien to me now, that we had a top-rate intelligence system, competing on the same level as the British... which my actual knowledge of is most likely heavily informed by James Bond movies... I still believe that Israel has it going on in that department, and it sort of scares me that they may be the only nation to actually be able to field competent spooks.
I'd have to say I don't feel all that bad about Dubya downplaying that report. It looks like they were asked to produce a report on what might be expected to happen in certain future conditions and they did. I think he's probably got a very realistic expectation of the CIA his dad used to run, it's capabilities and lack thereof. Of course, I'm one of the people that never took the existence of WMD argument as the primary reason for war in Iraq. I think those that now say they only tentatively agreed to war based on intelligence are just being facetious... they never agreed to the war and are just pummelling a straw man. Nobody went to war based solely on WMD intelligence.
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