This expert described a perfect storm of factors creating the failure. First, there was Iraq’s serial lying. A key Iraqi official has explained under interrogation that he told Saddam in the early 1990s that if they kept on lying, no one would ever believe them again. That tipping point was reached by the mid-1990s. But, importantly, we failed to detect that the rationale for Saddam’s lying changed in the middle of the decade. At first he was lying to preserve a WMD capability to use against his neighbors and enemy military forces. But as the government collapsed into a vortex of corruption, Saddam lied as a matter of survival. He was afraid that the Kurds and the Shiites would rise up against him if they knew he didn’t have chemical weapons to use against them. Then there was the issue of Iraqi emigres who were providing bad information, not just to the U.S., but to other countries as well. The U.S. often didn’t have direct access to these emigres who defected elsewhere, and would only get secondhand accounts of what they were saying. But since we had little in the way of human sources on the ground after inspectors were kicked out in 1998, the word of these emigres trumped all else. We also missed the general deterioration of Iraqi society that made it impossible for the Iraqi government to do much except to lie to itself and to others in a downward spiral of corruption and deception.