Two official reports come to disturbing conclusions about intelligence failures in the United States and Great Britain. Both identify systemic flaws in the collection and analysis of critical intelligence that resulted in the invasion of Iraq. There is much to learn from these episodes, but the most important lessons are the need for independent assessments of facts and conclusions and the insulation of that analysis from the policy process. Intelligence is always speculative and incomplete. It will never provide complete answers, and therefore the political judgments that follow will reflect varying degrees of uncertainty.

The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee earlier this month released the first part of its inquiry into the intelligence that provided a rationale for the invasion of Iraq. The report concludes that the intelligence community misrepresented and misjudged information about Baghdad's programs to develop weapons of mass destruction. Information that supported the notion that Iraq had WMD programs -- a belief shared by all major intelligence services, many governments and the United Nations -- was not examined critically, and intelligence that challenged that view was dismissed. Caveats and qualifications about conclusions were discarded, and a picture was presented that did not exist.

Intelligence panel Chairman Pat Roberts, a Republican, concluded that "most of the key judgments in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's WMD programs -- a crucial part of the U.S. administration's case for the need to go to war -- were either overstated or were not supported by the raw intelligence reporting." Vice Chairman Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat, said, "There is simply no question that mistakes leading up to the war in Iraq rank among the most devastating intelligence failures in the history of the nation." The Senate report blames "systemic weaknesses, primarily in analytic trade craft, compounded by a lack of information sharing, poor management, and inadequate intelligence collection."