What Went Wrong in Iraq

Just finished the December 2004 Atlantic, which had an article by James Fallows on what the US's options are with regard to Iran. (Answer: precious few.) The article described a simulation conducted by Sam Gardiner, a retired Air Force Colonel who has conducted wargames at the National War College and other military institutions for more than two decades. This quote stood out:

What went wrong in Iraq, according to our participants, can in almost all cases be traced back to the way the Administration made decisions. "Most people with detailed knowledge of Iraq, from the CIA to the State Department to the Brits, thought it was a crazy quilt held together in an articificial state." [Graham Allison, of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government] said. Because no such people were involved in the decision to go to war, the Administration expected a much easier reception than it met — with ruinous consequences. There was no strong institutional system for reconciiling differences between the Pentagon, the State Depamrtnet, the CIA, and other institutions, and the person who theoretically might have done this, Condoleezza Rice, was weak. "If you don't have a deliberate process in which the National Security Advisor is playing a strong role, clarifying contrary views, and hammering out points of difference, you have the situation you did," Allison said. "There was no analytic memo that all the parties looked at that said, 'Here's how we see the shape of this problem; here is the logic that leads to targeting Iraq rather than North Korea.'"