'This week marks the twentieth anniversary of America’s invasion of Iraq. Aside from the enduring controversy over the war itself, there’s broad agreement that the U.S. intelligence community failed policymakers and the public,' John R Schindler writes.
. It’s always easier to blame the spooks than admit that the White House screwed up something massive. Still, it cannot be denied that the intelligence community got this one wrong. That was the point of Michael Rubin's recent. He asserts, in part, that they"did what Washington should expect: circle the wagons and shirk responsibility."
When multiple intelligence sources are telling you similar things — above all, that Saddam had WMDs ready to go — the spooks tend to accept that . As Rubin concludes,"In effect, the SIGINT supported the HUMINT and vice versa, leading the intelligence community to accept the worst-case scenario."In the run-up to our invasion of Iraq, I headed up a multi-agency intelligence task force that focused on the Iraqi military.
Everybody got it wrong. Mainly because top Iraqi officials believed they still had WMDs, even though nobody knew any specifics. After we captured Baghdad I took part in a classified Pentagon program to figure out what really happened. It turned out that virtually all captured Iraqi generals believed they possessed WMDs, too, though none of them said they saw them with their own eyes. This was institutionalized self-deception on a truly grand scale.
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