Condoleezza Rice Quotes
Intelligence always carries uncertainties. That is the nature of the beast.
She was explaining why she supported the Iraq War which the George W. Bush administration started claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. After invading Iraq, it turned out that the “intelligence” was wrong—there were no WMDs. Many believe that the intelligence was fabricated to justify a war that Bush, Vice President Cheney and the neo-conservatives wanted for other reasons.
Condoleeza Rice, National Security Advisor (Republican), Secretary of State, Memoir, No Higher Honor, 2011
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Although most listeners had to spend some time parsing this famous quote, it actually was not a new notion. See Copernicus in linked quotes.
His catastrophic failure however was when he supported the Neocon ideology that Iraq had a nuclear bomb about to be deployed and urged a preventative war invading Iraq. Not only was there no bomb ready for deployment, there was net even a nuclear research or development program to do anything nuclear.
This seemingly abstruse philosophical statement actually found its way into one of the major political debates of the 21st Century when the Secretary of Defense was defending the management of the Iraq War and the interpretation of intelligence. See {586062}.
Condoleezza "Condi" Rice is an American diplomat, political scientist, civil servant, and professor who is the current director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Rice served as the 66th United States Secretary of State from 2005 to 2009 and as the 20th United States National Security Advisor from 2001 to 2005. A member of the Republican Party, Rice was the first female African-American secretary of state and the first woman to serve as National Security Advisor. Until the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008, Rice and her predecessor, Colin Powell, were the highest-ranking African Americans in the history of the federal executive branch (by virtue of the secretary of state standing fourth in the presidential line of succession).
