Going to War in Iraq

It is clear to me that the complete disconnect between the Intelligence Community (IC) and Presidential Administrations lead to the poor policy decisions in the 1990’s and early 2000’s regarding Iraq, Afghanistan, and Osama bin Laden. Immerman clearly lays out the failures of the IC and its un-comprehensive intelligence gathering and disconnect between intelligence gathering agencies, and while he argues that the Bush Administration, specifically, is “culpable for the grief that befell the United States in both Iraq and Afghanistan”, the disconnect within the IC should take as much of the blame as well (77).  When you have the Director of the CIA share the same assessment as the Bush Administration did, that Saddam Hussein “intended to augment a cache of WMDs that he had successfully concealed since expelling the UN inspectors in 1998 with a nuclear capability”, while being the director of an agency that resists that assessment leads to some miscommunication (84-85). Something must be said about the entirety of the blame being pushed on the Bush Administration, however.  After reading Immerman’s piece, a good portion of the blame for the “grief that befell the United States” should be placed on the Presidential Administrations and IC prior to the turn of the century. It can be argued that if the CIA predicted the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent rise of the Taliban, and if the Administration of the time had acted on the correct intelligence, then the US would not have gotten involved in Afghanistan. As for Iraq, if the Clinton Administration had acted on the intelligence provided by Israel and the UN inspectors about Saddam’s nuclear capabilities, then Saddam’s regime would've been properly dealt with after the First Gulf War and we would not have entered into Iraq under faulty intelligence after 2001 (79).

However, the Bush’s Administration’s push to enter Iraq because of WMDs, even though the intelligence was faulty and disconnected at best, I guess is Immerman’s thesis, and if it is, it is definitely supported by Bush’s own Presidential speeches. His continuous mentions of biological and chemical agents of destruction in his speeches show, that despite what the IC was saying about such things, that was the narrative that he was using in order to get the US into Iraq. Going back to the bigger discussion we’ve been having over the past couple of classes, I think that this WMD narrative makes sense at the time because, and maybe we can tease this out next class, if you just suffered a tragic attack that killed 3,000+ people, any mention of any threat is going to make it sound real, especially if the President of your country says it, so I think that the WMD narrative was a way to get the public on board with invading Iraq. However, why can’t you make this argument, “We were attacked by a stateless terrorist organization, and we have reason to believe that they have now entrenched themselves in Iraq with the support of Saddam Hussein”? To me, that sounds a little more probable and actionable.