American Eye

From 2004: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/jan-june04/kay_01-29.html Former chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay told Congress Wednesday that U.S. prewar weapons intelligence assessments on Iraq, which led to the American invasion, were "almost all wrong." Jim Lehrer speaks with Kay about his findings and why an independent investigation into the alleged intelligence failure was crucial. "DAVID KAY ...Secondly, I think we really miss a deterioration of Iraqi society that took place beginning around 1998 in which they spun into a vortex of corruption and graft that made their own interest in requiring more money and taking care of each individual and in not producing weapons in society. And, that's the reason we're having trouble in Iraq today. The social glue of that society was destroyed by Saddam Hussein. Saddam himself, we now know of about $6.5 billion of money illegally skimmed off the oil for food program -- by the Iraqis' own accounting 60 percent of that went into new palace construction and as explained to me that was because that's how could you take care of your friends new construction. It was a society that had simply fallen apart and we didn't detect that. We should have. JIM LEHRER: We should have. Why didn't we? What is your analysis of why we didn't? DAVID KAY: The strange thing, Jim, is this isn't the first time we failed to understand what is going on as a society. You can go back to the Second World War. We missed what was going on in Germany under strategic bombing; we found out only afterwards -- much more recently the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union fell, this giant, this superpower, we suddenly discovered we had a basket case on our hands. They couldn't feed its own people, couldn't care for it. I didn't have power. It was falling apart. In Vietnam for those of us who started our career sort of -- students of that era or creatures of that era more than students -- we misread Vietnamese society as well. We are not very good as a nation in our intelligence capability at reading the most fundamental secrets of a society, what are its capabilities, what are it's intentions? You can't photograph those. You need Americans on the ground penetrating those societies and people who are speaking their languages. Imagine that: we are not very good as a nation in our intelligence capability at reading other societies! We only see what we wish to see, that which we have already created in the mind and hold in memory. This is also true about things and entities other than foreign societies. It is also true of the Holy. We see only what we wish to see.