Intelligence and the Lack Thereof

First of all when you're trying to assess what an enemy is up to you pay your military and your intelligence people to prepare for the worst case. So intelligence by definition is supposed to be an ultimate example of worst-case thinking. The trouble with worst-case thinking is you begin to project threats and imagine threats as if they're real, and you begin to create responses based on those. Pretty soon you forget that you've imagined the threat.

--James Carroll, author of House of War

Mr. Carroll has written an interesting history of the Pentagon. A review of the book as well as an interview with the author is at Salon.com, here. (Note, if you're not a paying member of Salon.com, you'll have to watch a short ad before accessing their site.)

He also talks about the current looming crisis with Iran:

American tactical bombers are practicing the kind of maneuvers that are only used to drop a nuclear weapon. Well, even to pretend is wrong, because it violates the most important things put in place by Harry Truman, which is the use of nuclear weapons is unthinkable, and we'll never threaten a non-nuclear state with nuclear use. Well, we're threatening nuclear use, and we're apparently engaging in war games.

What do we expect the Iranians to do? Obviously they're going to dig in and accelerate their strategy. This is profoundly destructive. It's a profound betrayal of the government's obligation to protect us. It makes us more vulnerable to nuclear weapons than we were five or 10 years ago...

The Bush administration has already given Iran and North Korea every reason to get a nuclear weapon...