Friday, October 22, 2004

The Greatest Intelligence Failure In History

Most liberals would confidently identify that as the failure to find stockpiles of WMD in Iraq.

A large subset of those libs would immediately second guess themselves and suggest based on their immersion in the liberal echo chamber that W himself is the great intelligence failure. He's wickedly stupid and never listens to anyone don't you know?

Everything he does is based on faith and we all know how stupid religious hicks are, don't we? Or is he just an unscrupulous liar who's the mouthpiece for college drop-out Karl Rove who's so smart he manipulates us all like marionettes?

Sorry, I seem to get confused easily -- back to the history lesson...

First let's look at a description of one of the universally acclaimed great Presidents. We'll call him X:
X was also an outstanding example of a leader who, although not in any full sense an intellectual (he was a book collector rather than a book reader, and his Harvard grades were of a mediocrity that suggest that today he might have had difficulty in gaining entry to that august institution), ...
Sounds a lot like W's story at Yale, no? So he was easily duped by someone of clearly superior intelligence -- call him Y -- into spending massively to counter a threat that turned out to be nearly non-existant. X was duped so badly that he spent somewhere north of $25 billion on the fiasco.

Folks, this is easy for anyone who has even basic Google skills and understands the rudiments of inflation adjustment.

Can you tell me who X and Y were?

Can you tell me what he (and his successor) did that was the direct result of what was actually the greatest intelligence failure of all time?

And for another hint as well as extra bonus points: Was there a genzai bakudan? Or not? Was that an intelligence failure too? Do you think we'll ever know for sure?

Why are you so sure you know so much about the subtleties of war? Don't you think the answers to this should have required less than a moment's reflection -- rather than panicked Google usage -- if you were capable of decisive and authoritative judgements on intelligence successes and failures? How much have you really studied military history?

Could your accusations of incompetence and stupidity be fueled by projection?

I'm patiently waiting for your answers...