Until we got into Iraq we really couldn't say for certain what we'd find. Perhaps the politicals were right and the Agency's more cautious estimations of the Iraqi threat would be exposed as hopelessly naive. But now we're there. And from what we've found so far, the Bush administration's revisionist view of Iraq seems far more deeply flawed than what Hoagland called the Agency's "long-standing and deeply flawed analysis of Iraq."
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But it doesn't cut it to say, "This is just an intelligence failure. The White House just went with what they were being told." Why? Because you can't separate our failure to find a lot of what we thought we'd find in Iraq from the "war" the administration has been fighting with the intelligence community for the last two years. If the administration spent the previous two years "at war" with the CIA, pushing them harder and harder into a set of assumptions (and in many cases conclusions) that turned out to be wildly off-the-mark, shouldn't there be some political accountability for what turned out to be at best a very poor call?