Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Pejmanesque notices a good point

made in this Post article about our intelligence service. Despite glaring deficiencies in our intelligence resources, I've never been comfortable with saying that our intelligence prior to the Iraqi invasion was a "failure", simply because I'm not sure where the bar is in determining success. Intelligence is always hit and miss:
For all of its genuine distinction, the report has weaknesses. Foremost
among them -- a product of the blinding clarity of hindsight -- is a misplaced
perfectionism that feeds the dangerous fallacy that all intelligence failures
are the product of culpable, and therefore remediable, blunders.

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