It is a feature of policy making across the board that government officials feel compelled to portray themselves as knowing more about something than they do. I cannot recall the last time I heard a Member of Congress, administration official, presidential candidate respond to any substantive question saying, “I do not know.” Sen. McCain has admitted to rank ignorance about economics — a true fact if ever there was one — and his opponents have had a field day ridiculing him as economically illiterate. While simultaneously displaying equal or greater economic ignorance with conviction rather than humility.

I can imagine that when it comes to decisions founded on intelligence, it is exceedingly difficult for officials to come right out and say, “We have spent billions of dollars trying to figure this out, but we still do not know the answer.” So what did we get for our money, anyway?

So within the Executive branch, lawyers are always pressing officials to be more certain about the basis for their decisions, and especially so when officials are making decisions that are judicially reviewable. That approach is at war with the notion of making a decision based on precaution in the face of incomplete information. What the IC is experiencing is worse than judicial reviewability; it’s congressional second-guessing. But in both cases, government lawyers advise their clients to discard all data that undermines certainty.

In the environmental field, Europe (and the Left in the US) demands that decisions be based on the “Precautionary Principle,” the idea that regulators should not wait until they have proof of harm before taking action. It is amusing to watch advocates of the Precautionary Principle squirm, fumble, and angrily protest when it is used to justify preemptive military action. That is not an appropriate application of the Precautionary Principle, they say. To which some of us retort, “So it is right to make precautionary decisions with respect to imperceptibly small human health risks, but it is wrong to do when the risk of nuclear catastrophe is very large?”

1. It is not possible for intelligence to ever be so categorically definitive and perfectly “provable” that it can’t be spun.

2. As long as we use intelligence as a pretext for preemptive national policies, the temptation for various parties to spin it will be very strong.

3. Intelligence is spun by its users, and by bystanders and those in the peanut gallery, as well as by the IC itself. We are foolish to assume that any spinning must have occurred in the IC, before intelligence got to the first policy user. In the case of the 2007 Iran NIE, the IC was the spinner. But in the case of Iraq’s WMD programs, the fact that so many people firmly believe there was an intelligence failure is largely a product of spin from outside the IC.

Few who did not have a clearance before March 2003 have an accurate idea of what the IC – not Colin Powell, not George Tenet, but the IC – actually said about Saddam’s WMD programs. Those of us who were in it know, however, that both Powell and Tenet misrepresented the scope of what we thought Saddam either had on hand, or was in imminent danger of having. We did NOT say mushroom clouds were on the horizon; we did NOT say Saddam had vast stockpiles of anything; we did NOT think Saddam was about to put nuclear or chemical-tipped Scud missiles into the hands of terrorists.

That so many of you think we did say that is attributable largely, as far as I can tell, to Colin Powell’s UN speech, which did leave that erroneous impression. President Bush himself never couched his concern in such terms. He always spoke of the possibility that Saddam could provide forms of WMD to terrorists – and THAT, we (the IC) did say. Saddam had battlefield chemical weapons, chemical agents, projects for dual-use factories that could easily be used to produce biological or chemical agents, a long-standing nuclear program, ballistic missile programs, an R&D program for unconventional agent dispersal, and some unknown number of chemical-capable Scud missiles that had never been accounted for by UNMOVIC inspectors from 1991 to 2003.

After the invasion, incontrovertible evidence of every single one of the things on this list has been found (with the exception of the remaining chemical-capable Scuds, for which the evidence was potentially controvertible). Intelligence was not wrong about them.

I suspect Colin Powell overstated the threat from Saddam as a rhetorical means of being more convincing, possibly as much to himself as to the waiting world. One can’t argue that leaving Saddam to his devices could, eventually, have led to mushroom clouds and Sovietesque stockpiles; the fine point is how imminent that threat was. The IC did not estimate it was as imminent as Powell’s speech implied.

But Powell’s perceived need to couch the menace in the highest-threat terms is a window on the key philosophical division in the administration, which caused one set of partisans to emphasize the worst that Saddam could possibly, at some point, be capable of, and the other set to emphasize that all our information about him was, well, intelligence – and therefore imperfect. That philosophical division boiled down to this: whether what we knew about Saddam was ACTIONABLE or not.

Bush considered the list three paragraphs above – the list of things we have confirmed after the invasion — to be actionable. And his policy opponents did not. They did not think this list was enough of a pretext for invasion and regime change. The policy opponents, therefore, strove to emphasize about this list the following: Saddam’s battlefield chemical weapons were old; we didn’t know how much he retained of the raw chemical agents; the dual-use factories were dual-use: why couldn’t Saddam just be planning to manufacture vaccines and household cleaners?; his nuclear program had been languishing for years, largely since 1993; there were UN sanctions on his ballistic missile programs, and we ought to give the sanctions time to work; there are substantial obstacles to achieving effective dispersal of chemical or biological agents through unconventional means (e.g., aerial spraying by drone), and Saddam probably hadn’t gotten very far with this anyway; and there were UN sanctions on his Scud missiles, which ought to be given time to work, and may indeed have worked already: we could not be sure, but Scott Ritter had now changed his tune and thought perhaps they had.

The real failure of the Bush administration here was to not anticipate that when intelligence is the pretext for preemptive intervention, its presentation to the public is not only of paramount importance, but will be the subject of wide-ranging spin attacks by policy opponents. In extensive online searches of comments made by Bush himself, I have never found any exaggeration of the imminence or scope of Saddam’s capabilities in 2002-03. Bush was extraordinarily careful to say exactly what intelligence was telling him, which was that Saddam, who had a history of using WMD on his own people, and who had connections with terrorist organizations, continued to pursue WMD programs that could at some point put WMD in the hands of terrorists. (WMD can be as little as a gallon of VX; it does not have to be a nuclear SS-24 ICBM – and certainly not a stockpile of them.)

But that is not what people “remember” hearing at the time. Some insist that Dick Cheney was exaggerating the intelligence; I have found more that what Cheney did, on occasion, was hint at specific pieces of intelligence that tended to strengthen the basic list I outlined in paragraph 4, against the countervailing, attenuating emphasis Bush’s policy opponents were putting on its elements.

And THAT, in my view, was the key to the downfall of the “intelligence” about Iraq’s WMD. Bush’s policy advocates chose a bad tactic, in trying to defend the specific definitiveness of the intelligence. The whole Doug Feith, special assessments task force in the Pentagon was dedicated to this tactic – and while I can see clearly why it was adopted, it was an approach with inherent weaknesses. What Bush’s policy advocates should probably have done was not defend the intelligence, to the last ditch, against every spin attack, but defend Bush’s policy of choosing preemption, in which the very imperfection of the intelligence about Saddam’s WMD programs was a key factor.

Bush’s opponents could not hope to prove beyond a doubt that Saddam would never pose a WMD threat of any kind. If the Bush policy had been formulated to require them to, as the price of changing his mind, it would have been much harder for those opponents to make political hay of the inherent ambiguity of intelligence.

Bush did not base his preemption policy on a pretense of absolute knowledge: he based it precisely on the ambiguity of our knowledge about Saddam. He made a tacit choice that few (as far as I can tell) have exactly articulated: to NOT wait until Saddam’s programs had crossed some defined threshold that he would ask intelligence to advise him of, but to go ahead and act, on history and general suspicion. The weakness of his “PR campaign” about this policy is that it did not deal effectively with lasting impressions created by his opponents, and by some in his administration, that he HAD defined a threshold, and due to intelligence, considered Saddam to have crossed it.

Once that impression became the coin of the realm, any attenuating factor in the pre-decision intelligence could be presented as evidence that a policy mistake was made. It could also be presented as an intelligence community failure that needed Thomas Fingar’s guiding hand to redress.

I actually think the longer-term lesson here is for policy. If we refer back to 1, 2, and 3 from the beginning, we recognize that we can never make intelligence so incontrovertible that it can’t be spun, or at least have doubt cast on it. Preemptive policy will almost certainly be stymied as long as it demands definitive intelligence. Bush was able to make the choice to act precisely because he did NOT define a threshold and wait for definitive intelligence. Where we do the opposite, we are likely to find that the threshold curves asymptotically, and if our policy opponents can manage it, will never intersect with the axis of actionability.

This may help put in perspective why I don’t agree with the unspoken assumption of many conservatives that if we were only doing intelligence “right,” it would be an infallible excuse for action, and one that policy opponents couldn’t spin. That will never be the case, but it is also not a cosmic tragedy that it won’t. What we need is to learn what pitfalls and supporting efforts attend preemptive policy – a new and largely uncharted territory for us — and be ready for them.

In a recent House testemony involving the “Big Five” of the US Intel community (ONDI, CIA, DIA, FBI and INR), the chairman of the House Committee was more interested in “hiring diversity” than almost anything else. Randy Fort, head of INR told of personally heading career counseling conferences at Howard University in this effort. You might be interested in his specific comments and those of the others, especially ones by the Chairman indicating that he will watch the progress of these organizations with personal interest. The upshot of all of this is if you are not a minority, forget about equal treatment in the Intel community hiring and training - employment - process.