The Bush administration and its supporters often fall back on the “nobody’s perfect” defense when it comes to estimating how much things cost or what sort of weapons our enemies possess. But it seems odd to me that if inaccuracy is our problem, the margin of error would exist on both sides of the correct answer. Why is it that I never hear about the Bush administration vastly overestimating how much things will cost, or how large the deficit will be? By the same token, can we think of any intelligence failures that kept us from starting a war that politicians wanted to start? I don’t know if you can ever go back in history and find a war-hungry politician that didn’t go to war because the intelligence estimates of an enemy’s strengths or intentions didn’t support bellicosity.