I think it is telling is what we found out that the relationship between the Taliban and Al-Qaida. What we actually knew beforehand was that the two were tight enough to justify go after the former to get the latter. But on the ground we found that it was much tighter than we had imagined. This is an example of good intelligence that gets proven out in the field.

Now contrast that to the WMD-in-Iraq stuff. It was the flimsiest of tissues held together by some pretty questionable threads. You would hope that the leadership of a super-power could tell the difference between the two. Sadly, not this super-power.