Blame, Blindness ...

Now that President Bush, with all the enthusiasm of a dog going to the vet, has been yanked into naming a bipartisan commission to look into intelligence failures in Iraq, I'd like to see yet another commission established. This one would look into the real failure of intelligence — not the CIA but America's political, social and intellectual leadership. No mere analyst at the CIA caused us to go to war for the wrong reasons.

It's not that I think the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community are blameless. Something clearly went way wrong — not just with Iraq but with Sept. 11 as well. Two such massive intelligence failures in a single presidential term are something that history, although not necessarily this meek Congress, will hold George W. Bush accountable for.

But when it comes to Iraq, it would be folly to limit any inquiry to just the intelligence community. David Kay assures us that intelligence analysts were not pressured by the Bush administration to doctor their findings to please their bosses. With all due respect, this is the same Kay who once, with a huge amount of enthusiasm, thought Iraq was one vast repository of weapons of mass destruction. In other words, he ain't infallible.

Moreover, he seems to have never hung around an office water cooler. Anyone who has can tell you that bosses usually don't pressure. But they do hint at what pleases them. When all your bosses are seeking a certain outcome, it takes a gutsy subordinate to give them the bad news. This is not just the way the CIA works. This is the way life works.

The intelligence community, too, lives and works in Washington — and Washington wanted to go to war. Facts — at least they seemed to be facts at the time — supported the march to war. An intelligence analyst would have to be nuts to step in front of this train. Maybe the Washington consensus was right? Why risk the wrath of Cheney?

But any truth commission worth its name would have to look beyond the government. It would be instructive to examine the yahoo mood that came over much of the nation once Bush decided to go to war. The decision — its urgency — seemed to come out of nowhere. Yet most of America fell into line, and in certain segments of the media, the Murdoch press above all, dissent was ridiculed. On Fox TV, France was called a member of the "axis of weasels" and antiwar demonstrators in Davos were disparaged as "knuckleheads." Colorful stuff, but wrong, irresponsible and craven.

I do not take myself off the hook. The mood got to me, too. And while I kept insisting that the Bush administration was exaggerating the case for war, was in too much of a hurry and was incapable of assembling a true coalition, I nevertheless went along with the program.

There is much cause for concern here. A consensus — based on false facts, outright lies and exaggerated fears — took over the nation. We didn't go on a bender, as we did after Pearl Harbor, and incarcerate a particular ethnic group, but we did go to war when we plainly did not have to. More than 500 Americans and thousands of Iraqis have died for a mistake. Peace has not been brought to the Middle East and America is not only no safer than it was, it may well be in even greater danger. This was no mere failure of intelligence. This was a failure of character.

Why? No newspaper column could provide all the answers. But we were clearly unnerved by the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and the subsequent — and now mostly overlooked — anthrax attacks, which disproportionately affected the news media. Saddam Hussein provided us with a nifty and useful personification of evil — not to mention spurious links to al Qaeda. He was something familiar, Hitler and Stalin all over again. There was an understandable urge to settle some scores. Finally, though, there was smugness — the sort of American exceptionalism that so rankles non-Americans. No one better exemplified that than Bush himself. He proclaimed a divine right to unilateralism, oozed a smugness bred of incuriousness and an airy dismissal of dissent. He knew what he knew with such fiery certainty that even now he seems incapable of facing reality. He's like a kid who refuses to accept the fact that there is no Santa Claus.

By all means, proceed with the independent commission. A huge mistake has been made, and we need to know why. But if for a moment we think that it was the CIA alone that took us to war, then we will have learned nothing from what happened. That would be the gravest intelligence failure of them all.