Fred Hiatt has written an important column in today’s Washington Post. Hiatt has taken the time to read and carefully analyze a report released by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.VA), chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence. Rockefeller’s charge, boiled down to its essence, is that President Bush and his Administration lied during the run-up to the war with Iraq.

“In making the case for war,” Rockefeller’s report says, “the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when it was unsubstantiated, contradicted or even nonexistent.”

The problem with this claim, as Hiatt points out, is that in Rockefeller’s own report we learn that what President Bush said about Iraq’s nuclear weapons program, about biological weapons, production capability and mobile laboratories, about chemical weapons, and about Saddam’s alleged ties to terrorism were repeatedly “substantiated by intelligence information.” And Hiatt helpfully quotes from a statement by Rockefeller made in October 2002:

There has been some debate over how ‘imminent’ a threat Iraq poses. I do believe Iraq poses an imminent threat. I also believe after September 11, that question is increasingly outdated. . . . To insist on further evidence could put some of our fellow Americans at risk. Can we afford to take that chance? I do not think we can.

The Committee’s vice chairman, Senator Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.), filed (with three other Republican senators) a minority dissent that includes many similar statements by other Democrats and points out that for all the partisan skewing of the Rockefeller report, “the reports essentially validate what we have been saying all along: that policymakers’ statements were substantiated by the intelligence.”

This judgment is consistent with the March 31, 2005 Report to the President by The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, also known as the Silberman-Robb Report, which stated

The Intelligence Community’s Iraq assessments were … riddled with errors. Contrary to what some defenders of the Intelligence Community have since asserted, these errors were not the result of a few harried months in 2002. Most of the fundamental errors were made and communicated to policymakers well before the now-infamous NIE of October 2002, and were not corrected in the months between the NIE and the start of the war. They were not isolated or random failings. Iraq had been an intelligence challenge at the forefront of U.S. attention for over a decade. It was a known adversary that had already fought one war with the United States and seemed increasingly likely to fight another. But, after ten years of effort, the Intelligence Community still had no good intelligence on the status of Iraq’s weapons programs.

Hiatt points out that some in the Bush Administration spoke with too much certainty at times, but that is a world apart from intentionally misleading people. And Hiatt’s larger point is also correct:

the phony “Bush lied” story line distracts from the biggest prewar failure: the fact that so much of the intelligence upon which Bush and Rockefeller and everyone else relied turned out to be tragically, catastrophically wrong. And it trivializes a double dilemma that President Bill Clinton faced before Bush and that President Obama or McCain may well face after: when to act on a threat in the inevitable absence of perfect intelligence and how to mobilize popular support for such action, if deemed essential for national security, in a democracy that will always, and rightly, be reluctant.

The intelligence failure that preceded the Iraq war was enormously costly, and it’s certainly reasonable to argue that some of those mistakes should have been caught in advance. It’s worth noting, though, that even so respected a figure as Secretary of State Colin Powell, who went to the CIA for four days and three nights in an effort to ensure that the claims he was about to make in his February 5, 2003 speech to the U.N. were accurate, got a great deal wrong.

The case for going to war with Iraq was made in good faith — and while the war will never be popular, a good outcome in Iraq could redeem the original decision. It simply depends on what unfolds in Iraq over the next several years. Regardless, reforming and improving our intelligence agencies should rank as among the highest priorities of the next Administration. If we don’t, America’s leaders will be forced to make enormously consequential decisions while flying blind. And that’s a very bad, and dangerous, position to put them in.