That’s the thing about equivocal evidence: People read it through the lens of their pre-existing biases, and the pre-Iraq War biases on the Right (and not only on the Right) were similar to the biases that led the Committee on the Present Danger to overestimate Soviet strength in the 1970s – specifically, a belief that dovish analysts elsewhere in the government were underestimating the capabilities of America’s enemies. In both cases, highly intelligent people got things dramatically wrong, by reading into incomplete evidence and drawing unwarranted conclusions that dovetailed with their own political prejudices. In neither case, I think, do you need to assume duplicity to explain what happened. ~Ross Douthat

This makes a certain amount of sense, but I tend to think that when government officials talk about a “reconstituted” nuclear program and warn about the possibility of “mushroom” clouds on the basis of admittedly “equivocal evidence,” they are still engaged in something that is not terribly ethical.  It also occurs to me that the “highly intelligent” bit is part of the problem–many of these people are highly intelligent (albeit often poorly informed or confused about certain things) and this leads them to believe that they, of all people, could not get something like this wrong, which makes them less cautious than thoroughly duller minds might be.  But leave that aside for the moment. 

If this really boils down to pre-existing biases rather than deception (which I don’t entirely accept myself), that would actually be worse in some ways for Cheney and the foreign policy approach he favours.  Okay, maybe not for Cheney personally, since he would implicated in deceiving the public, but for the brand of interventionist policy he supports it would be a boon to admit the administration’s deceit.  If this is all a question of pre-existing biases colouring perceptions of equivocal evidence, it would mean that the reflexively hawkish, suspicious, shoot-first-and-then-keep-shooting sort of foreign policy recommendations that lead to the Committee on the Present Danger and Iraq war hawks getting things so thoroughly wrong have a pretty poor track record over the past 25 years and should not be taken very seriously in future policy debates.  If future conflicts are going to turn on such questions of intelligence, the tendency to exaggerate threats, fear the worst and support pre-emptive strikes will become less and less persuasive and credible.  This will be a good outcome for the country, but I have to wonder whether it might not be in the interests of interventionists to begin agreeing with the rhetoric about administration lying (all in a “good cause,” of course).  The lies could be pinned on the administration, while the interventionists could claim that they, too, had been misled: “We were only responding in the way we believed was responsible given what the government was reporting about the nature of the threat!  Who knew that they would lead us astray?  We have been tricked!”  Who knows?  The people foolish enough to believe Mr. Bush’s whoppers might just believe this bit of revisionism.