Jervis finds flaws in U.S. intelligence

Students packed into a small conference room in Mary Gates Hall Friday afternoon to hear a lecture from Robert Jervis, a Columbia professor on international affairs and one of the nation's foremost foreign relations experts.

The title of the lecture was "The Politics and Psychology of the Iraq Weapons of Mass Destruction Intelligence Failure."

Only a few days after President Bush's sixth State of the Union Address [HTML_REMOVED] the same forum in which Bush made his case for the existence of WMDs five years ago [HTML_REMOVED] intelligence failure regarding Iraq is still a hot button issue, and considering Fridays' impressive turnout, one that is on the minds of UW students.

Jervis' lecture focused primarily on flaws within the U.S. intelligence system that led to the misjudgment about Iraq's weapons capabilities.

He primarily discussed the CIA [HTML_REMOVED] an organization that Jervis compared to NASA and the Roman Catholic Church as "poster-children of the problems of organizational pathology and reform improbability."

Jervis said the organizational flaws within the CIA, combined with "excessive confidence," led U.S. intelligence officials to act on assumptions rather than carefully analyzed data.

He argued that while there were compelling reasons for the United States to suspect that Iraq had WMDs, this suspicion was taken as conclusive fact before being definitively proved.

"The people who did this were not idiots," Jervis said. "These were not glaring errors. They made a reasonable inference based on evidence."

The evidence, however, which became the rationale for a costly and ongoing war, turned out to be wrong.

According to Jervis' assessment, the "highly politicized" nature of the Iraq issue is as much the culprit as failures within the intelligence community.

"Fake intelligence did not cause the war in Iraq," Jervis said. "There was exaggeration on the part of the administration, which cherry-picked information."

Jervis said the Iraq issue was approached with a flawed, occasionally paradoxical logic on the part of the intelligence community and the Bush administration.

"There was a belief that whatever evidence they found was just 'the tip of the iceberg.' Well, what if that was the whole iceberg?"

Jervis quoted former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who said in a 2001 press conference (regarding the contested question of whether or not Iraq has WMDs): "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

"That logic is so convenient because it makes the case un-falsify-able," Jervis said. "How many dry holes do you have to dig to prove that there is nothing down there?"

Jervis lecture was followed by a brief response by Jason Scheiderman, a Ph.D. student of political science, as well as a question and answer session.

Reach reporter Siv Prince at news@thedaily.washington.edu.