Intelligence Failure

Francis Fukuyama blames the media for its obsessive focus on the State of the Union address which contained the assertion about Iraq's nuclear ambitions. The media is missing the real issue: the "institutional intelligence failure" regarding the missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Fukuyama predicts that no weapons will be found, and that this stems from the systemic bias toward pessimism following the WMD programs discovered in 1991 and especially after the intelligence failure that lead to 9/11. The credibility of the intelligence community is at stake, not that of the administration. David Kay, former U.N. weapons inspector, is undertaking a review of what the intelligence community knew after 1991; his findings need to come out soon.