Military deception and propaganda

[Entropy]

Fuchs,

You wrongly disparage Europe's intelligence capabilities. They lack many of our technical collection capabilities, but other than that, they are equals. In some areas they provide superior information to what the US has.

You also fundamentally misunderstand intelligence itself. Very rarely is there "definitive" or "smoking gun" evidence. One doesn't need much analysis with definitive "Zimmerman telegram" type of information. The intelligence business is almost always about "interpretations of tiny bits of info" that require a significant analysis. Most of those tiny bits of info are ambiguous, meaning the info could potential support multiple conclusions. Inevitably, analysts, for one reason or another, will look at a body of such evidence and reach the wrong conclusion. This is particularly true when there is deception by an adversary, which was the case with Iraq. Iraq was simultaneously attempting to convince one audience it still had WMD and another audience that it did not. This duplicitous policy was confirmed by many of the principles in Iraq's hierarchy.

It's astonishing how difficult it is to admit mistake and lying or officials.

Well if you ask anyone in the intel business (including me), they will tell you that the Iraq WMD debacle was a huge mistake - so big there was a commission on the subject along with several studies and a major reorganization of the US intelligence community. I'm not sure who is refusing to admit mistake except perhaps some politicians, but then politicians rarely admit mistakes on anything.

Lying is a different matter. The difference between lying and simply being wrong comes down to intent. As I said, it may be the case that some policymakers intentionally lied about Iraq. In fact, it would not surprise me at all if that were the case - deception and selling policy is part of a politician's job description. It's hard to know for certain, however, because many honest people (like me) looked at the evidence and came to similar conclusions as the policymakers you believe lied. How can you know that someone like me was simply wrong while concluding with certainty someone else lied? The problem with your argument is that a lot of honest people who saw the same evidence thought Iraq still had WMD as well.