The question you need to ask Geoff, is if our intelligence about Iraq was so bad, what about our intelligence about countries that might actually present a serious threat that we have no idea about? I am not comforted at all by this massive failure. Neither should you be.

This is, of course, the main point Kay was trying to make in all his interviews and hearings. And it is a critical one. What do we REALLY know about the nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea? Unfortunately, many of the people Kay was talking to were not interested in any aspect of this situation that did not stick a knife in Bush. I watched and listened to the Democrats at that hearing. Most of them left.

If there is an intelligence failure, it obviously precedes the Bush administration. The Clinton administration came to the exact same conclusions based on the same intelligence input. Nobody wants to hear this, because it doesn't help destroy Bush.

In fact, since other intelligence agencies also came to the same conclusions, it's beginning to look to me like the information coming out of Iraq was such that it would have been hard for a reasonable person to come to any other conclusion. Nobody wants to hear this either, for the same reason.

There may be many issues here. The inability of the CIA to use less than pristine sources after the great "cleanup" of the 1970s. The disinformation programs within Iraq that had many Iraqis, even generals, perhaps even Saddam, convinced they had WMD. And there are others. If you want to find real solutions, you may have to be willing to accept scenarios that do not paint Bush as the Great Satan.