In today’s segment of the Uncommon Knowledge interview with Douglas Feith, the blunder that underlay all our other blunders in Iraq: Lousy intelligence.
In his new book, War and Decision, I begin by noting, the former Undersecretary of Defense writes a simple and syntactically anodyne sentence that nevertheless proves simply astonishing: “The CIA actually knew very little about Iraq.” But by the time we invaded, Saddam Hussein had been flouting the agreements he had made at the end of the first Gulf War for nearly an entire decade, and regime change in Iraq had been the official policy of the United States for some five years. Our principal intelligence-gathering organization “actually knew very little about Iraq?” How could this have been?
Click on his picture, and Douglas Feith will explain.