Via The Corner - Jeff Jacoby, in his column for the Boston Globe, asks the important question:

THREE WEEKS before the London bombings of July 7, Britain’s Joint Terrorist Analysis Center advised policymakers that ‘‘at present there is not a group with both the current intent and the capability to attack the UK.’’ That reassuring message from the country’s top intelligence and law enforcement officials, The New York Times reported last week, prompted the British government to lower its terror alert. Less than a month later, 52 people were murdered and 700 wounded when three subway trains and a bus were blown up in the worst act of terrorism the United Kingdom has experienced since the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988.

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Which kind of intelligence failure is better — the kind that badly understates a threat, such as the one in London, or the kind that overstates a threat, such as the insistent warnings before the invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein was armed with weapons of mass destruction?

Of course no intelligence failure is desirable. But even in the best intelligence services, they are sometimes inevitable.

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If intelligence failures are inevitable — and in a world of human fallibility, they are — we are better off worrying too much about our enemies and taking steps to defeat them than worrying too little and being caught, unready, when they attack. Worrying too much led the United States and Britain to topple a brutal tyrant. Worrying too little led to 9/11 and 7/7.

This is the crux of the matter that faced President Bush before the invasion of Iraq - Given imperfect intelligence information, should he have given Saddam Hussein the benefit of the doubt, or assumed the worst? It's important to remember here that Saddam invested a great deal of money and manpower to hide his actions. So it's understandable that our intel agencies had imperfect information.

But when you're the president, and the CIA Director says, as reported by Bob Woodward, that the case against Saddam is "a slam dunk", you must act.

An honest evaluation leads to the conclusion that the president acted reasonably given the information he had at the time. Do those on the left who constantly repeat the "Bush Lied!" mantra not understand this? Or do they simply place their narrow partisan interests ahead of the interests of U.S. national security? They should be pressed to answer Jacoby's question - do they want the president to worry too much about people like Saddam Hussein, or too little?