paul pillar was the national intelligence officer for the middle east during the run-up to the iraq war. pillar's article will appear in the march/april 2006 issue of "foreign affairs" (thanks to patrick lang from chez booman for hosting the pdf of the article)
anyway, pillar doesn't really say anything all that new: that the bush administration cherry picked intelligence to make a case for invading iraq that really wasn't in the raw data and that the administration fixed the intelligence around the case for war, or as pillar put it, the administration took the traditional model of intelligence informing policy decisions and "turned the entire model upside down. The administration used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision already made." by the end of the process, the bush administration had created a case that iraq was pursuing nuclear weapons when there was no good evidence that it was, and completely fabricated ties between saddam hussein and al qaeda.
we've heard this kind of thing before. pillar is just another example of a long string of administration defectors who tell us a consistent story about how the bush administration manufactured the case for war. add it to the heap of cassandra wanna-bes coming out of the administration to warn us the iraq war is a fraud, years after it's too late to stop the fraud from happening.
so any day now, the republican guns will turn on pillar. it won't be a surprise. as i said, we've seen this kind of thing before. soon, we will be hearing about how pillar once gave money to a democrat, or how he shouldn't be trusted because he doesn't like cats (not even kittens!), or how he never was in cambodia on any major holiday, or how bush once beat him in parcheesi and has been clamoring for revenge ever since.
who knows what they will come up with? all that is certain is that it will come. and that it will seem pretty flimsy to anyone not already under bush's spell, and that it will seem utterly convincing to those who are.
so bring it on. i need a good laugh
