The Pentagon Report on Intelligence: Aiming at the Wrong Target

— -- As a former director of intelligence assessment for the secretary of defense, I find the debate over the reporting done before the invasion of Iraq by the Office of the Under Secretary for Policy to be aimed at the wrong target and a bit absurd.

There is much to criticize in the work done by that office. It seems to have been consistently bad and hopelessly biased. The fact is, however, that Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz knew exactly in appointing Douglas Feith to this position what Feith's beliefs were, and what kind of result would emerge from setting up such an analytic office under him. No one could possibly have expected unbiased analysis and no one got it.

True believers inside government, however, are scarcely a new form of intellectual disease in the Washington community. Objective analysis has been the exception, not the rule for decades. So has the manipulation of history, weapons tests, intelligence and every other conceivable source of information. Focusing on bad work and bias in any one briefing, or by any one office, hardly seems fair.

For decades, I have seen officials in the office of the secretary of defense and other departments, and officials and officers in the military services, manipulate intelligence and studies to serve their own interests, and tailor briefings to the same end. In fact, the neoconservatives have probably abused the system far less in going to war in Iraq than the neoliberals did in Vietnam.

Such efforts have long become part of the "information is power" game in Washington, and using secrets is an essential part of winning it. More than two decades ago, for example, I had to fight the USAF tooth and nail to stop them from pushing DIA into creating a threat aircraft simply to justify their latest fighter procurement. I saw another element of the office of the secretary of defense try to manipulate intelligence on Soviet artillery to justify reliance on tactical nuclear weapons, and I watched the Army fake T-72 intelligence to justify the M-1.

Anthony Cordesman is an ABC News Consultant and a Senior Fellow, Center for Strategic and International Studies.