The BBC notes that the Senate's references to a global failure of intelligence implicates also the British intelligence services.
The commentaries ventilate quite rightly the issue of how much of the blame should lie on their political masters. But there seems to me to be a gap. Neither now nor before the war was there any attempt to understand the Baathist regime in Iraq as composed of human beings. I remember asking on another progressive list before the war what could be Saddam Hussein's motivation for maintaining stocks of WMD and persisting in denying that he had them? No one was able to quote any source that illuminated this question. Psychologically this is about demonization of the enemy. Socially it is about contempt for non-european peoples whose regimes are just dicatorships and who torture people in a crazy way, unlike our own regimes which are models of pure democratic will. That is a failure of intelligence. And it is ideological blindness. Chris Burford London
