Intelligence chief blames war policy

Gently admonishing President Bush, the nation’s newly retired chief intelligence analyst suggested that the Iraq war was as much the failure of policymakers as it was the flawed intelligence on which they relied.

Bush told ABC News last week that his biggest regret was “the intelligence failure in Iraq.”

“I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess,” he said.

Thomas Fingar, until this week the deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, declined to directly address the president’s swipe. But he said: “I learned something a long time ago in this town. There are only two possibilities: policy success and intelligence failure.”