Two decades ago, a U.S. president embraced flawed intelligence about Iraq's WMDs, sparking a war and an eight-year occupation. Today, a different president ignored accurate assessments on Iran - and watched the predicted consequences unfold. The failure, Shane Harris writes in The Atlantic, belongs not to the intelligence community but to the decision maker who chose to ignore it.
In a detailed analysis, "Hvylya" notes, The Atlantic's national security correspondent lays out the contrast between the Iraq and Iran cases. A 2005 bipartisan commission found the intelligence community "dead wrong" on Iraqi WMDs. But on Iran, the agencies were consistent and accurate: the regime had no nuclear weapon ready to deploy, its ballistic missiles could not reach the United States, and a military strike would push Tehran to close the Strait of Hormuz and attack neighboring Gulf states. All of this was presented to Trump before the war began, according to The Atlantic.
Trump has publicly contradicted these assessments. "The regime already had missiles capable of hitting Europe and our bases, both local and overseas, and would soon have had missiles capable of reaching our beautiful America," he said before a Medal of Honor ceremony on March 2. The Defense Intelligence Agency, however, had concluded that building such a missile would take Iran until 2035, and only if it was determined to do so - which analysts concluded it was not.
The reforms that followed the Iraq failure were designed to prevent bad intelligence from reaching the president unchallenged. In many respects, Harris argues, those reforms worked. But they could not account for a leader who had been "seduced by previous military successes into thinking that the U.S. armed forces, under his inspired and perhaps divinely endowed command, could never stumble."
Trump's allies have faulted him for skipping the public case for war that the Bush administration built before invading Iraq. Harris suggests there may be a reason for that: had Trump accurately presented the intelligence, the facts would have argued against attacking Iran - or at least for exhausting diplomatic options first. CIA Director John Ratcliffe told Congress he had participated in "dozens and dozens of briefings with the president" in the weeks before the war.
Trump has said he will know the war is over "when I feel it, feel it in my bones." The intelligence community, Harris concludes, is neither designed nor equipped to restrain a president who is moved by impulse rather than information. It can only provide data. When the president distorts what he is told, that failure belongs to him alone.
See also: "Hvylya" previously examined how Trump's "America First" approach eroded the alliances that underpinned U.S. security.