44 Strategic Analysis/Jan-Mar 2005 Travails of Intelligence Assessment: From Failed to Fertile Imagination S Kalyanaraman Abstract September 11, according to the Commission that investigated that catastrophic event, was a result of a failure of imagination. Iraq’s non- existent weapons of mass destruction, on the other hand, could be characterised as a case of fertile imagination exhibited by US intelligence and the George W. Bush Administration. Intelligence failure is the facile answer given to describe what went wrong in both cases. This article offers a more nuanced answer that takes into account the political context in which the threat posed by Osama bin Laden was analysed and acted upon. In the case of Iraq, the article details the pre-determined orientation of several senior members of the Bush Administration to effect regime change in Baghdad and how this inexorably traversed down the line within the US intelligence bureaucracy. -*- Intelligence failure is the facile answer given to describe what went wrong in preventing the September 11, 2001 attacks. A more nuanced explanation, however, would take into account the political context within which these assessments were made. September 11 happened in an international geopolitical environment that is best captured by the fuzzy phrase ‘the post-Cold War era,’ the chief characteristic of which was not a direct military threat from one or more Great Powers but a multiplicity of diplomatic and military interventions around the world designed to maintain peace and stability. Even though by the late 1990s, the US intelligence community had begun to realise the growing threat posed by Osama bin Laden, terrorism was never listed as the threat facing the United States. The first part of this article details the events and policy responses in the period before September 11, and offers a critical analysis of the 9/11 Commission Report. Part two deals with the exaggerated intelligence estimates about Iraq’s Weapons Strategic Analysis, Vol. 29, No. 1, Jan-Mar 2005 © Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses