How I Love People

On the one hand, it's sad we invaded Iraq on the basis of lies about WMD. But there is an upside, too, which is the endless stream of government reports about our lies about WMD. Read carefully, these reports demonstrate something I've always believed—the US government is filled with human beings. Which is to say, lovable numbskulls.

Too many people believe the CIA, White House, etc. are filled with supergeniuses, either malevolent or benign. WRONG WRONG WRONG AND WRONG. They are just like you and me; ie, big doofuses. And while they are often malevolent, this arises from weaknesses of which we're all capable... greed, vanity, pettiness, and lust for the large office on the second floor that Tom got but that we deserve.

A truly beautiful example of this is found on page 89 of the government report released yesterday (pdf). Apparently at the beginning of the 2003 the CIA had started to have doubts about the key defector "Curveball." (Nice codename!) So they sent email to a Division Chief at the Defense Intelligence Agency asking for more information on Curveball.

The DIA division chief was irritated by this request and forwarded the CIA's email to subordinates, saying "CIA is up to their old tricks" and did not "have a clue" about how Curveball had been handled.

EXCEPT HE ACCIDENTALLY SENT THIS EMAIL TO THE CIA TOO.

Who among us hasn't made this type of embarrassing email faux pas? And that's my point: you assume that people who have the power of life and death over so many would be more careful than the rest of us. But you assume wrong.

Best of all, it's not just Americans who assume the US government has some idea what it's doing. The final CIA report on Iraq's non-existent WMDs described the thoughts of those in Saddam's inner circle as war approached:

Saddam told them, “What can they discover, when we have nothing?” But some of the ministers were not as sure. [Minister of Military Industry] Huwaysh said he began to wonder whether Saddam had hidden something: “I knew a lot, but wondered why Bush believed that we had these weapons,” he said. Huwaysh could not understand why the United States would challenge Iraq in such stark and threatening terms, unless it had irrefutable information.