Thanks to Spinwatch, I've come across a brilliant new piece of analysis by John Prados of the US-based National Security Archive, which describes itself as "An independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University".

Prados has posted online an early draft of the US government's published White Paper on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs. The draft was produced in July 2002, while the White Paper was published that October. Although the White Paper was claimed to be a distillation of the US government's National Security Estimate, it is now clear that it pre-dated it.

Prados compares the versions of the White Paper and compares the process with the UK government's dossier, of which an early draft was dated June 2002. He draws the conclusion that the two governments were colluding at that point to put the case for war. He also describes the politicisation of intelligence, taking issue with the Bush administration's claim that "intelligence failure" was responsible for its false claims about Saddam's non-existent weapons of mass destruction. While "a real intelligence failure did occur", this

was abetted and magnified by the Bush administration’s drive to use charges about alleged Iraqi WMDs as justification for war.

Prados also refers to the latest report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which makes a point that the Butler review really didn't get, that overstating certainty is going beyond intelligence:

In most of these cases the SSCI study found administration claims “substantiated” by the available intelligence but portraying the data as more certain than it was, thus going beyond the intelligence, while failing to convey disagreements among intelligence experts.

Finally, he makes a point about the parallel processes:

The preparation of white papers on both the United States and British sides also needs to be taken into account. That Bush and Blair each turned to their intelligence agencies for the papers is significant—they were evoking the imprimatur of secret intelligence to justify policy preferences. Both papers had the function of justification, not analysis, and neither government waited until it had compiled all the evidence before demanding these products. Neither government asked for intelligence estimates, fashioned in secret, in order to inform policy on Iraq. Instead, both Bush and Blair did want their intelligence agencies to carry out avowed political agendas.

The Guardian has reported the publication of the International Institute of Strategic Studies' (IISS) annual strategic survey.

The IISS says that little has been done to correct the intelligence errors that led to the Iraq war, strangely blaming the spies rather than the spin doctors and politicians who misrepresented their analysis, adding certainty to uncertainty.

"The problem was not so much one of intelligence analysis as of the inability of the UK's analytical community to put themselves into the minds of those whose behaviour they were analysing," it says. Intelligence staff did not try to imagine what Saddam and his entourage were up to. "At no point did anyone consider the possibility that, to contradict former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, absence of evidence might in fact indicate evidence of absence," says the IISS.

The IISS is on tricky ground here, having published its own dossier on Iraq's non-existent wmd in September 2002. It said (I quote from the press release):

The retention of WMD capacities by Iraq is self-evidently the core objective of the regime, for it has sacrificed all other domestic and foreign policy goals to this singular aim.

What was that about putting yourself in the mind of those whose behaviour you are analysing? It now looks as Saddam merely wanted his neighbours to think he had wmd and that his obstructiveness was aimed at that.