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[Phys-l] scientists are pretty bad at intelligence analysis



(I have changed the subject line)

In response to my comment that western intelligence services believed at
the time that Iraq had WMD, Bernard attempted to to show, through a
collage of snippets from after-the-fact commentaries, reports, gossip,
and speculations, that it is unreasonable to think that intelligence
agencies actually believed in Iraq's WMDs. He concludes:

No intelligence service believed Saddam had an ongoing WMD programme in 2003-- instead their lying was to justify his illegal overthrow.
I think this is quite a wonderful illustration why ideology has no place
in science. And how easily it corrupts even those who consider
themselves rational.

Even if one accepts every snippet that Bernard quoted as truthful and
factually correct, and that no counter evidence exists, they -- at best
-- make the case that some intelligence agencies may have not been 100%
sure that Iraq possessed WMDs even as their stated position was that
Iraq did posses WMDs. And Bernard conveniently forgets that nobody at
the time focused on Iraq having nuclear devices -- the focus was on
Saddam possessing chemical and biological shells, with a much more
remote *potential* for relatively rapid development ability for some
type of primitive nuclear devices.

Intelligence analysis is a game of chance -- one never has the full
information. In most cases one has only a few incomplete fragments of
information, often contradictory. Based on those, one needs to come up
with a plausible and coherent position statement that one can present to
politicians for policy making. And, then, one also needs to weigh the
consequences of making a mistake. Typically, over-estimating a danger
leads only to over-spending of resources to provide unnecessary
defenses; under-estimating a danger leads to exposing a nation to deep
risks. Consequently, intelligence analyses tend to run to the
conservative side -- they tend to remember the disastrous consequences
of the optimistic assessment in 1945 of how long it would take the
Soviet Union to acquire a nuclear weapon, or how safe are the Egyptians
"army maneuvers" in 1973. But "typically" is all it is -- sometime the
conservative assessment turns out to be the more dangerous one.
Scientific approach and rational thinking have just so much to
contribute; the rest relies on experience, guesswork, and knowing your
enemy.

Whichever it is, one cannot -- should not! -- ever confuse a
retrospective intelligence analysis with a prospective one. In
retrospect things look much clearer, contradictory evidence is either
removed or clarified, and what actually happened versus what could have
happened is rarely discussed. It suddenly looks so rational in a
hindsight ... and so easy for pundits to attach malicious intentions
where lack of information is the most obvious explanation.

I have seen it done from very close. And that's I find Bernard's
"analysis" a useless pile of Monday morning quarterbacking colored by
his political ideology. The French certainly had no particular interest
in us going to war with Iraq, but they believed Iraq had WMDs. Israelis
were not, contrary to what one might think, particularly interested in
Americans going to Iraq -- the memories of Saddam firing missiles on
Israel during the 1991 Gulf war were not remembered very fondly, yet the
Israeli intelligence believed Iraq has WMDs.
bc thinks either Ze'ev is either joking or duped
And Ze'ev thinks BC has no idea of the difference between a mailing list
chatter and an actual intelligence analysis.



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