Two administration officials, who declined to be identified, suggested that if the administration harbored the same doubts in 2002 that it harbored now, the negotiating strategy for dealing with North Korea might have been different — and the tit-for-tat actions that led to October’s nuclear test could, conceivably, have been avoided.

... One former official said that it was Ms. Rice, in a meeting at the C.I.A. in 2004, who encouraged intelligence officials to soften their assessments of how quickly the North Koreans could produce weapons-usable uranium.

“She asked, how did we know about the timing, and they didn’t have answers,” said the former official. “Did they have Russians and Chinese helping them? No one was sure. It was really a guesstimate about timing.”

Different players in the 2002 debate have different memories. John R. Bolton, the former American ambassador to the United Nations, who headed the State Department’s proliferation office at the time of the 2002 declaration, said in an interview on Wednesday evening that “there was no dissent at the time, because in the face of the evidence the disputes evaporated.” Mr. Bolton, one of the most hawkish voices in the administration and a vocal critic of its recent deal with North Korea, recalled that even the State Department’s own intelligence arm, which was the most skeptical of the Iraq evidence, “agreed with the consensus opinion.”

This sounds like revisionist history to me. How convenient that Condoleeza Rice is being heralded as a voice of reason just when we have finally made some progress on a deal with North Korea, a deal we likely could have had 5 years ago. As for John Bolton's claim of a consensus in the intelligence community, even among the State Department intelligence analysts, I have great doubt as to the veracity of that remark.

Bolton was put in charge of the non-proliferation office at State by Bush, and he continually pushed the most aggressive line toward the North Koreans. Furthermore, he had the constant support of Vice President Cheney, a known hawk when it comes to "rogue nation states" not named Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. And lets not forget the Bush administration's SDI initiative, which largely was hyped on the potential threat of North Korean ballistic missiles tipped with nuclear warheads.

So color me highly skeptical of any claim that "bad intelligence" is to blame for our foreign policy blunders regarding North Korea. This is the administration that sees what it wants to see, hears what it wants to hear, and suppresses any dissenting voices. They wanted to paint a picture of North Korea as a dangerous nuclear threat to the United States, so that is the picture they got. When you name a country part of the "axis of evil" evoking images of the original "axis powers," Nazi Germany, Militarist Japan and Fascist Italy, from WWII, the intelligence tends to get fixed around the policy, not the other way around.

North Korea US Intelligence Community CIA George W. Bush John Bolton Condoleezza Rice SDI Axis of Evil Nonproliferation