While we're waiting to hear from the president on the end (sort of) of combat duty in Iraq, this seems as good a time as any to recall how we got there in the first place. The August 19, 2010 issue of The New York Review of Books featured an exchange of letters that deserves your attention: "The CIA and WMDs: The Damning Evidence." Fulton Armstrong was a member of the National Intelligence Council from 2000 to 2004. He wrote to the NYRB in response to a book review by Thomas Powers of Robert Jervis's Why Intelligence Fails. Jervis had concluded that the Bush Administration and intelligence personnel made an honest error in promoting evidence of WMDs as a reason for invading Iraq. Armstrong wrote to say that the errors weren't so innocent.

The National Intelligence Estimate produced by these [national intelligence officers] on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, with the participation of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, was not subjected to the customary peer review of the National Intelligence Council....When we on the National Intelligence Council finally got a full read of the National Intelligence Estimate on WMDs, after its publication, a couple of us expressed grave reservations about the fatally weak evidence and the obsessively one-sided interpretation of what shreds of information it contained. (We were not told at the time that Curveball was a solitary source of obviously questionable credentials, nor that contradictory evidence was actually suppressed from the intelligence collection and dissemination process.) One colleague said it was clearly a paper written to provide a rationale for a predetermined policy decision to go to war.

Armstrong goes into great detail on how the erroneous report was created and promoted (and this in a letter that was cleared by the CIA!). He also notes that those responsible were never reprimanded:

The National Intelligence Council and director of central intelligence, George Tenet, gave the NIOs concerned with WMDs big cash awards for producing the NIE, and seven years later and seventeen months into the Obama administration they remain in the same or equivalent jobs.

Both Armstrong's letter and Powers's response are worth reading in full. Powers concludes by noting that, despite the evidence, the "honest mistake" theory is safer and easier than pushing for an investigation into what went wrong and who was responsible. Armstrong, for his part, lays out why we ought to care enough to get at the truth:

Covering up or ignoring the problem of politicization wont make it go away. US intelligence will continue to fail again and again until we resolve it.