The “Key Judgments” section of a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), titled “Prospects for Iraq’s Stability: Some Security Progress but Political Reconciliation Elusive,” was released today. I am generally skeptical about the merits of NIE’s since it is often not clear what their judgments are based on, what type of intelligence went into formulating these judgments, and what intelligence was left on the cutting room floor. And, as with the NIE on Iraq’s WMD programs in 2002, the Intelligence Community frequently errs in its assessments. Since the NIE is a consensus document, the analysis is also confined to the lowest common denominator that all agencies can agree upon, which doesn’t tell you much more than you can learn from reading open sources or making simple guesstimates. This is not to say that the NIEs are totally without merits, and occasionally they contain an interesting nugget of information. In at least two instances, the latest NIE is a good example of all the problems I described above. The following paragraph appears on the last page of the NIE: