CIA: C U l8r!

The Wife and I had a brief conversation last night on the purge going on at the CIA... she thought I was being overly alarmist at the possible outcomes of the course the White House has been taking. Perhaps I am, but I would like to point out a few things:

1) The problems that have resulted from the administration's willful ignorance of the CIA's analysis has already led to huge problems... about 1200 dead, several times that wounded, as many as 100,000 dead Iraqis, and a few hundred billion pissed away (and rising). Is pointing out that more events and worse are like this are likely to occur in such an environment being "overly alarmist?"

2) Never underestimate this administration... just when you thought they jumped the shark with one Orwellian deal, they immediately smack you with an even bigger one.

3) Don't assume there is some sort of breaking point in sight... this administration got re-elected, didn't they? And Jeb Bush is waiting in the wings...

The Wife also pointed out that the CIA got some things wrong on Iraq as well... and she is certainly right on that point. However, the general population doesn't know much about how much they *did* have right and, as Josh Marshall points out, when they were wrong they weren't close to being as wrong as the Bushies. A good example of this was concerning the types of WMD we thought we might see: the neocons screamed about mushroom clouds while the CIA types thought that Iraq still had some chemical/biological capabilities of various degrees... they are both WMD, but are miles apart in terms of importance to our security.

For a good overview of all this, good see Kevin Drum and check out the links as well.

Update: One last thing about all this... why aren't people listening to guys like Scott Ritter and others who had the balls to question the administration and were proven right? Timothy Noah had a great article on this in August which looked at the weird dynamic in which the folks who were wrong seem to be getting more kudos than the guys who were right... crazy.