I worked with Bob Woodward when serving as a press officer at the National Security Council during President George W. Bush’s first term, and I believe him to be one of the fairest and the most thorough journalists in Washington. Nonetheless, his recent piece in the Outlook section of the Washington Post misses the mark in several respects.
Woodward’s argues that the debacle of the Iraq-WMD case should have made us all more circumspect about intelligence, and that everyone in the Bush administration understood this lesson except the Vice President. His case in point is the Syrian nuclear reactor destroyed by the Israelis in September of 2007. US intelligence had discovered the reactor months before. At a National Security Council meeting in June of that same year, Cheney urged a US strike. The President declined and would later write in his memoirs that he was dissuaded by the doubts—fully shared by virtually the entire intelligence community—expressed by CIA Director Michael Hayden.
