Mark Twain is often quoted as saying, “Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.” While this certainly sounds like Twain, there’s no way to confirm that he actually said it. Given this, we have two options: we can admit we don’t have enough evidence to link the quote to Twain, or we can go with our gut and give Twain the credit we think he deserves. If we’re intellectually honest, we’ll take the first option. If we’re neo-conservatives, the second option may be more appealing. To understand why, consider the neo-conservative uproar over the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE).

The NIE, representing the consensus view of all 16 American spy agencies, concluded with high confidence that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003. Although it reported with “moderate-to-high” confidence that Iran was “keeping the option to develop nuclear weapons,” Iran won’t be able to acquire the raw materials necessary to produce a nuclear weapon until the middle of the next decade.

The NIE challenged the rhetoric the Bush administration had been using to justify a war with Iran, and their neo-conservative supporters did their best to discredit it. John Bolton spearheaded the attack.

Bolton is a diplomat who has served in several Republican administrations and was most recently the US ambassador to the UN. He’s been involved in a number of key neo-conservative think tanks, like the Project for the New American Century, the American Enterprise Institute, the Council for National Policy, and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. His contempt for the UN and for international law is well-known, as is his tendency to resort to what can only be called a form of faith-based intelligence gathering. On May 6 2002 he claimed that Cuba possessed “at least a limited offensive biological research development effort,” and that it had provided bioweapons technology to “other rogue states.” Even the Bush administration distanced itself from these claims, and Bolton refused calls by several Senators to present a Senate hearing with evidence to back up his assertions. Bolton’s warnings were thoroughly discredited when a 2004 Congressional investigation into Cuba’s pharmaceutical industry failed to find any connections to terrorism. Just as he believed that Cuba was developing bioweapons, he believes that Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons and that it must be stopped through American military intervention.

Bolton has harshly condemned the NIE report. In a December 6 2007 article for the Washington Post he argued that the report drew an artificial distinction between Iran’s civilian and military nuclear programs and that it was “internally contradictory and insufficiently supported.” Most tellingly, he wrote that “the risks of disinformation by Iran are real. We have lost many fruitful sources inside Iraq in recent years because of increased security and intelligence tradecraft by Iran. The sudden appearance of new sources should be taken with more than a little skepticism. In a background briefing, intelligence officials said they had concluded it was “possible” but not “likely” that the new information they were relying on was deception. These are hardly hard scientific conclusions.”

He has also accused the NIE of politically motivated bias. On Fox News on December 3 2007 he said, “I really think the House and Senate Intelligence Committees have to look at how this NIE was put together because there are a lot of unexplained points in here . . . I think there is a risk here, and I raise this as a question, whether people in the intelligence community who had their own agenda on Iran for some time now have politicized this intelligence and politicized these judgments in a way contrary to where the administration was going. I think somebody needs to look at that.”

Bolton is asking us to ignore the evidence presented in the NIE in favour of his assumptions about Iranian duplicity and the existence of an anti-Bush conspiracy within the intelligence community. By letting his prejudices override the evidence, Bolton is abiding by long-established neo-conservative practice. According to John Gray, professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and the author of Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (Doubleday 2007), this practice dates back to the 1970s and the Cold War.

The neo-conservatives of that era rejected the idea that the Soviet Union had, despite its ideological origins, come to resemble a normal state with interests that weren’t necessarily always in conflict with American interests. In opposition to this view, neo-conservatives argued that because the Soviet Union was a totalitarian state it would always be hostile to the US. Their opposition to American attempts to engage the USSR led to the development in 1976 of the B Team, designed to operate through the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and to be a rival source of intelligence for the US government.

Gray writes that “The B Team revealed some lasting traits of neo-conservative thinking. It mistrusted empirical research, rejecting analysis of the kind carried out by the CIA and other US intelligence agencies on the ground that available evidence—whether derived from open sources or covertly acquired—was liable to be disinformation and could not be used as a reliable guide to Soviet abilities or intentions. . . . The aim was to find out the truth about Soviet conditions, but given the Soviet record of disinformation the normal rules for assessing evidence had to be suspended. Any attempt to assess Soviet behaviour using standard empirical methods led into a ‘wilderness of mirrors.’ . . . In this area nothing could be believed or trusted, for even facts could be planted.”

The B Team operated on the assumption that knowing the character of one’s enemy was infinitely more important than gathering evidence about what that enemy was actually doing. By understanding the enemy’s soul, one could predict the enemy’s actions and see through the enemy’s deceptions. The method for doing so, however, was firmly grounded in ideological prejudices, so that rather than revealing the enemy’s soul it simply summoned up misleading caricatures. The B Team were consistently guilty of seeing the enemy they wanted instead of the enemy they actually had.

Gray notes that “Because they disdained empirical research, the B Team had no procedures for checking its assessments, and as a result they were wide off the mark.” For example, the B Team consistently overestimated Soviet military capacity. At one point the Team even interpreted their inability to find evidence that the Soviets had a non-acoustic anti-submarine system as evidence that such a system could in fact exist: “In other words, the Team viewed the absence of evidence as evidence in favour of its view. A methodology of this kind contains no means of detecting actual disinformation.”

The B Team is no more, but their intellectual legacy continues in the work of powerful neo-conservative think tanks like the ones Bolton is affiliated with, not to mention organizations like the Office of Special Plans (OSP), a Pentagon unit created by Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld. Gray writes that “the OSP rejected established procedures for evaluating intelligence and ‘stove-piped’ their own version of events directly to the White House. Like the B Team, the OSP had a definite agenda that featured overriding and discrediting the intelligence provided by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). The OSP became the chief source of claims about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction and links with al Qaeda that were used by Bush to justify the war on Iraq.” The administration demonstrated that it had learned nothing from the Iraq debacle when, in mid-2006, veterans of the OSP were assigned to lead the Pentagon’s “Iranian Directorate”.

Gray bluntly states that “The notion that a type of occult insight into a regime or person removes the need for factual inquiry is a perilous basis for action.” That such a notion could structure the foreign policy of the world’s only superpower frightens me far more than conspiracy theories that portray the neo-cons as diabolically effective criminal masterminds. If Gray is correct, then neo-conservatives like Bolton aren’t smart people who are putting us on; in a very real sense, they’re imbeciles who actually mean what they’re saying.