Speaking of Bolton...a possible unexpected by-product

After publishing my previous post, I went to War and Piece, and found a link to a New York Times article which discusses some of the recently declassified emails about John Bolton. I don't have time to explore this in detail now (I have a big band gig out of town tonight), but I will say here that the activity to come in the Bolton process could do what every official commission has expressly failed to do--examine the politicization of intelligence in the run up to the Iraq war.

UPDATE: I got home from my gig about 1:15 a.m., went online, checked Laura Rozen's site, and saw a post that was not there when I wrote the above paragraph. She noted that 1) David Ignatius, of the Washington Post, wrote a column about Ohio Senator George Voinovich and Bolton on April 22, 2005, and 2) that the Cincinnati Post published that column with the following headline: "Facing down a bully." The portion of the column quoted by Rozen really jumped out at me:

The problem with Bolton, in fact, is that he epitomizes the politicization of intelligence that helped produce the fiasco over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The Bush administration has so far evaded any real accounting for its role in the Iraqi WMD blunder, letting the intelligence community take the hit. The Bolton saga is a microcosm of that larger failure: It's the story of a policy-maker who tried to pressure intelligence analysts into supporting WMD views that turned out to be wrong.

(emphasis added). I really hope this kind of analysis and opinion gains more momentum.