Fixing the Facts or Missing the Mark? Intelligence, Policy, and the War in Iraq.

British and American intelligence agencies produced bad estimates of Iraqi capabilities before the war in 2003. Why? Official postwar inquiries concluded that intelligence analysts fell victim to a series of familiar pitfalls that caused them to draw false inferences from limited information. Others blamed policymakers in London and Washington for pressuring intelligence officials to exaggerate the threat. Both arguments are half-right. Analysts certainly began with incorrect but plausible assumptions of Iraqi capabilities, meaning that their estimates were always likely to conclude that Iraq possessed at least some latent unconventional capabilities. Subsequent policy pressure, however, caused intelligence officials to lean toward worst-case scenarios and stifle dissenting views. The politicization of intelligence also inhibited reassessment in the months before the war, despite new information from UN weapons inspectors that conflicted with standing estimates. This paper explores the evolution of British and American assessments and the pattern of intelligence-policy relations in both countries. It also explains why it is often impossible to understand the content of threat assessments without understanding the political context in which they are written. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]