Though the intelligence failures surrounding Iraq are now well known, recent history is abundant with examples of flawed intelligence that have affected key national security decisions and contingency planning.  They include, for example: the poor quality of the intelligence gathered on the ground in Viet Nam; the underestimates of the scale of the Soviet Union’s military efforts during the Cold War; a lack of awareness about the brewing Iranian revolution that forced the Shah, an American ally, to flee the country; the failure to detect the preparations for India’s nuclear test; and consistently underestimating the number of missiles that China had deployed along the Taiwan Straits.  For Iraq, there was a similar pattern of intelligence estimates that had dangerously miscalculated Saddam Hussein’s nuclear capability.  After the Gulf War, UN inspectors were surprised ti discover that Iraq had been no more than a year or two away from having enough fissile material top produce a nuclear bomb.

David Kay, the chief UN weapons inspector in 1991, believed it would have been only twelve to eighteen months until the regime reached “regular industrial-scale production of fissile material, ” or enriched uranium, that could be used in an atomic bomb.

From Known and Unknown by Donald Rumsfeld

“The capacity to grasp and manipulate complex ideas is enough to define intellect but not enough to encompass intelligence, which involves combining with judgment and care in selecting relevant explanatory factors and in establishing empirical tests of any theory that emerges. Intelligence minus judgment equals intellect.  Wisdom is the rarest quality of all- the ability to combine intellect, knowledge, experience, and judgment in a way to produce a coherent understanding. Wisdom is the fulfillment of the ancient admonition, “With all of your getting, get understanding.” Wisdom requires self-discipline and an understanding of the realities of the world, including the limitations of one’s own experience and of reason itself. The opposite of intellect is dullness or slowness, but the opposite of wisdom is foolishness, which is far more dangerous.”

“George Orwell said that some ideas are so foolish that only an intellectual could believe them, for no ordinary man could be such a fool.”

From Intellectuals and Society by Thomas Sowell