A sobering article by a longtime CIA analyst, highlighting the failures of strategic intelligence in the Gulf War, provides the context for viewing the burgeoning debate on U.S. policy toward Iraq.

In the summer issue of Political Science Quarterly, Richard Russell, a member of the faculty of the National Defense University and a 17-year analyst at the CIA, offers a balanced view of the successes and failures of the agency in the first showdown with Saddam Hussein. The CIA was more accurate or less biased than the military in its battle damage assessments of the limited effectiveness of coalition efforts to take out Saddam’s missile launchers, Russell says.

But on the larger question of judging Iraq’s capabilities and goals, Russell gives his old outfit bad marks. “The greatest weakness of CIA’s performance,” he writes, “was its lack of human assets inside the Iraqi regime able to report on Saddam’s plans and intentions.” Lacking those sources, the CIA projected Iraq’s strategy by guessing what it would do if it were in Baghdad a process known as “mirror-imaging.”

That, Russell says, “led analysts to judge that Iraq would only go for a limited land grab against Kuwait instead of an all-out occupation. The poor human intelligence performance is not a lone incident in CIA’s history.”

Russell quotes former CIA Director Robert Gates on the agency’s sorry record in human intelligence: “We were duped by double agents in Cuba and East Germany. We were penetrated with devastating effect at least once Aldrich Ames by the Soviets, and suffered other counterintelligence and security failures. We never recruited a spy who gave us unique political information from inside the Kremlin, and we too often failed to penetrate the inner circle of Soviet surrogate leaders.”

Given that history, the first obligation of administration policy-makers and of members of Congress who are debating and must ultimately decide our policy toward Iraq is to question the quality of the information on which we are preparing to act. The specific answers cannot be made public, but that fact simply magnifies the obligation for those privy to security secrets to ask hard, skeptical questions of their briefers.

The public debate so far has singularly failed to answer the question of how close Iraq may be to acquiring nuclear weapons. Its possession of chemical and biological weapons does not seem in doubt, but the regime’s readiness to risk massive retaliation for the use of any of these weapons is very much an open question.

We know much less than we need to know about the strength of Saddam’s army and its willingness or reluctance to fight. The temper of the populace is also undefined, and that will be critical, not just if we invade but over the long years we would have to occupy the country.

Yet other important questions arise from the nature of our coalition. On the surface, many of the nations around the globe and in the immediate neighborhood that supported and helped finance the first war with Saddam, because of his naked aggression against Kuwait and his threat to Saudi Arabia and other countries, now are urging the United States not to take pre-emptive action against Saddam.

Will those countries swallow their doubts and rally ’round if American forces move ahead anyway, or will we find ourselves operating alone, a long, long way from home, counting our casualties while others twiddle their thumbs?

What will be the reaction in an Arab world, already inflamed against the United States because of our role in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle? And what will be the economic impact on a nation with a shaky economy, a growing budget deficit and rising costs from the war on terrorism?

A useful start in addressing these questions has been made in the recent hearings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and in many newspaper essays and television debates. But the most important voice that of the president has been missing.

President Bush has been clear about his goal removal of Saddam Hussein but has left the country and the world in the dark about how he intends to accomplish it.

When he first put Iraq on notice, seven months ago, he said that “time is not on our side.” Time has passed, and despite the steady repetition of that goal, we are no clearer on what the president intends or how.

The leader of a democratic country must build support for such a fateful step. A midterm election looms. But the president must heed his own words: Time is not on his side, either.