As the White House’s race to pin blame for the nonexistent Iraqi WMD fiasco on the CIA continues unbounded, Joshua Micah Marshall takes pains to point out that it was Dubya & Co.’s encouragement of more aggressive intelligence techniques that got us into Iraq in the first place.

He writes:

… You can’t separate our failure to find a lot of what we thought we’d find in Iraq from the “war” the administration has been fighting with the intelligence community for the last two years.

If the administration spent the previous two years “at war” with the CIA, pushing them harder and harder into a set of assumptions (and in many cases conclusions) that turned out to be wildly off-the-mark, shouldn’t there be some political accountability for what turned out to be at best a very poor call?

Marshall has been all over the intelligence follies and is a must-read.