Stupid People on Intelligence

Behind the din of the Right’s attempts to discredit the CBS documents – a controversy to which I’m surprised to have paid almost no attention – some significant events stubbornly insist on occurring. High on my list of these events would be the Administration’s decision to downplay the National Intelligence Estimate, an annual report intended to predict threats to national security over the coming year, and to aid bureaucrats in setting foreign policy. This year’s NIE is pretty clear that Iraq’s a cauldron which the United States neither adequately comprehends nor controls. So what’s the reaction among the conservative commissars and G&T generals? The spokeman for the National Security Council says the NIE is "more of an academic think piece" than an actual forecast of future conditions.

It’s too bad that the Pentagon’s started turning down academic advice now, after years of remasticating whatever those eggheads Condi Rice and Paul Wolfowitz had vomited forth. Now, though, they pooh-pooh an argument constructed by people whose reasoning abilities aren’t compromised by loyalties to the ideologies of the Eighties – the 1880s.

Oh well. At least this NIE will still be available when President Kerry takes his oath of office in January.