The Senate Select Intelligence Committee report on pre-war U.S. intelligence in Iraq inspires two unexpected questions: 1) Why didn't more elected officials question the Central Intelligence Agency the way Vice President Dick Cheney did? 2) Did any politicians question the CIA enough?
 
Americans have grown accustomed to the manifest excellence of our armed forces. When our elected leaders told them to take Iraq, they did it in a matter of weeks, with remarkably little collateral damage or loss of life. Government doesn't get any more efficient than the 3rd Infantry Division marching through sandstorms to Baghdad.

 But the Senate report depicts a CIA whose efficiency often resembled the U.S. Postal Service more than the U.S. Army.

 Cheney wouldn't take CIA reporting for granted. He peppered the agency with questions. Some Democrats would like to depict his inquisitiveness as an effort to pressure the agency to change its analysis to suit Cheney's foreign policy agenda. Truth is, more elected officials should have questioned the agency like Cheney did.

 He was a doubting Thomas who wanted to see for himself.

 The Senate report says Cheney visited the agency five to eight times between September 2001 and February 2003. To be sure, he brought his own mindset and asked questions directly of the analysts monitoring Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs. But he did not try to get these analysts to skew the evidence or their conclusions. Nor, according to the report, did any policymaker.

 A CIA manager, describing the character of meetings with Cheney, said: "It was trying to figure out why do we come to this conclusion, what was the evidence, a lot of questions asked, probing questions, but no pressure to get us to come to a particular point of view."

 Yet, Cheney was a lonely inquisitor on the CIA's analysis of Iraqi WMD.

 Senate Intelligence Chairman Pat Roberts, R.-Kan., concluded that CIA analysts did better in tracking Iraq's ties to terrorists precisely because, in this area, more policymakers hammered them with questions. "(W)here there was pressure and repetitive questioning, we got a pretty good product," Roberts said Sunday on CBS's "Face the Nation. "Where there was no repetitive questioning or very little . . . on the WMD section, that's when we got some problems."

 Pressure from politicians is not why U.S. intelligence was so wrong about so much in Iraq.

 One reason seems to be that the United States studied Iraq the way we study the moon: Many years ago, we sent men there to make observations. More recently we were content to gaze from afar, photographing it from space, monitoring it with instruments. The problem with this approach is that while the moon is made of stone, Iraq is made of people.

 We needed good information on what Iraqis -- both leaders and commons -- were thinking and doing. We didn't get it. Continued...