Michael Ledeen is impressed with the complexity and amusing historical parallels of the prevailing opinion on Saddam Hussein's weapons capabilities. Ledeen dubs the Ba'athist Iraq's WMD program, as according to David Kay, "Potemkin," after the city-scale con pulled on Catherine the Great. But he's not buying:

As I say, it's a terrific theory. But I'm skeptical, and I've got a real reason for my skepticism, which David can easily confirm. Last August I called him in Baghdad to tell him that I had a person — a good person, like himself, a person I trust — who was prepared to take him to an underground laboratory from which a quantity of enriched uranium had been taken a few years ago, and smuggled to Iran. Wow, he said, let's go look. Have the guy call me, we'll check it out.

The guy could never get David on the phone because the CIA decided not to investigate after all. The CIA never went to look, and I don't know if that stuff was real or fictional. But this case was totally different from the Potemkin WMDs of David's elegant theory. Because my guy was in contact with the people who said they had moved the stuff from Iraq to Iran...He said the people who had done the smuggling had a full description of the material on a CD Rom, which they were willing to provide. CIA wasn't interested. And that's the end of it, so far as I know.

So there's one instance where the CIA wasn't curious enough to take a ride and look at a lab. And I ask myself whether there were other such cases. I know of other examples, not involving WMDs, but involving Saddam's money, where CIA refused to look, and the stories they were told — and decided not to believe — turned out to be true.

...And then there's the story from the Syrian journalist in Paris who claims to have maps from high-ranking military intelligence officials in Damascus, identifying the sites where, he says, some of Saddam's stockpiles were moved. Have we checked that story?

Ledeen agrees that the CIA is hurting for reform, though for strikingly different reasons as are popular in Washington today. That political debate risks wandering into discussions on whether despots deserve the benefit of the doubt. As I've been asking for the past several days: Is this a failure of intelligence, or a failure of the belief that intelligence can reliably penetrate the closed societies of dictatorships? Remember that Iran, North Korea, Libya, Syria and other nations possess weapons programs that would never have been detected without those countries' respective admissions. To what extent were those shortcomings in intelligence preventable? Reform Langley to political satisfaction - and perhaps coax it out of the sociology business. But we shouldn't assume that we will ever have the luxury of knowing exactly what goes on behind steel-wrought doors. American military action cannot be constrained by doubts about inherently fragmented intelligence.

THAT'S WHY THEY CALL HIM 'INSTAPUNDIT': Glenn Reynolds puts it simply. "The only way to be safe is to invade first, and answer questions later." Exactly. Dictators don't have legitimate claim to any power - let alone 4th Amendment protection.