On Wednesday, January 28, 2004, Peter D. Feaver wrote in
The Wasington Post ( Page A21):

• Intelligence failure was inevitable given the nature of the Iraqi regime. The new conventional wisdom is that Hussein wanted us to think he had a more advanced WMD program than he thought he had, and that Hussein himself thought he had a more advanced WMD program than he really had. If Hussein could be deceived in a country where he had absolute power, where he regularly punished betrayers by slipping them through human shredders or having their wives raped in front of them, then any external intelligence service was going to be deceived as well. The intelligence community accurately reported that Hussein was hiding things, that he was pursuing WMD programs, that senior members of the Iraqi military-industrial complex were convinced Iraq was pursuing WMD. Given Iraq's record, it would have been heroic to connect those dots into the picture we now think we see, namely that it was mostly Iraqi actors deceiving each other and everyone else.

Heroic? We spend $30 billion a year on intelligence, and good deal of it, I fear, pays for the kind of twisted logic Mr. Feaver - presumably with a straight face - is trying to fob off on the public.

A cynic might begin to suspect that, for the intelligence community at least, failure is more profitable than success.

Nevertheless, no matter how you cut into this whole sorry mess, the record clearly shows that during the rush to war, lurking in the small print and on the back pages, credible voices were telling a different story: The Niger yellowcake caper, the hyped claims for the aluminum tubes, the "drones", and all the rest of the breathless scare stories were dismissed by the Bush administration's own experts.

So when it comes to the pre-war hype about Iraqs WMD, you can slice it anyway you like, but it's still baloney.

And $30 billion buys an awful lot of it.

S