The Hazards of Partial Intel

No matter what the U.S. and U.K. said, it seems that Iraq never had Weapons of Mass Destruction. And yet, based on unsubstantial, fragmentary evidence, they launched a major offensive that served to steel jihadists across the Middle East. “Arguably we gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi jihad,” Eliza Manningham-Buller, former director-general of MI5, said this week. The Financial Times’ David Gardner believes the same intelligence breakdowns could happen again with Iran. Currently, there is no evidence to support accusations that Iran is building a nuclear weapon. But Gardner argues that it is quite possible Western governments will once again “cherry-pick” bits of intelligence to march into Tehran. “If you are going to go to war, you need a pretty high threshold, and I think there are very few who would argue that the intelligence [on Iraq] was substantial enough on which to make that decision,” Lady Manningham-Buller said.