Intel oversight

We must learn from British debacle on spy oversight

The damning verdict has been rendered.

Last week, after years of snail-paced study, a card-carrying member of the British establishment finally made public an encyclopedia-sized autopsy of how the British political, military, diplomatic and intelligence establishment essentially concocted a case to launch an illegal war in Iraq.

As Sir John Chilcot makes plain, central to making that now discredited case, were the largely anonymous inhabitants of the British “intelligence community.” What Chilcot makes also plain is just how breathtakingly inept that so-called “community” was in assisting the now equally discredited Prime Minister Tony Blair in fashioning his case for war since we now know, beyond any doubt, that all of it was founded on comical dribs and drabs of worthless intelligence.

Of course, there is nothing even remotely funny about the human consequences of a case for war built on sand castlelike “intelligence.” The scale and nature of the suffering Iraqis have had to endure, and continue to endure, is almost incomprehensible. But the architects of this calamitous war, including British spies, remain rather comfortably around, still immune from any meaningful accountability for their shockingly disastrous performance.