The right stuff.

• Author: Pillar, Paul R.
• Position: Clear and Present Dangers

WHAT COMES to mind when someone mentions intelligence and the Iraq War? Why, of course, the intelligence estimate on Iraqi unconventional weapons programs--excoriated in a 500-page report that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence issued with much fanfare in July 2004, further torn apart in another 500-page report by a White House-appointed commission, and scorned and vilified ever since.

But the estimate on weapons was one of only three classified, community-coordinated assessments about Iraq that the intelligence community produced in the months prior to the war. Don't feel bad if you missed the other two, which addressed the principal challenges that Iraq would present during the first several years after Saddam's removal and the likely repercussions of regime change in Iraq on the surrounding region. After being kept under wraps (except for a few leaks) for over four years, the Senate committee quietly released redacted versions of those assessments on its website on a Friday as Americans were beginning their Memorial Day weekend.

The Bush Administration had not requested any of the three assessments. Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee asked for the weapons estimate, which was rushed to completion before Congress voted on the resolution endorsing the war. I initiated the other two assessments and also supervised their drafting and coordination. My responsibilities at the time as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia concerned analysis of political, economic and social issues in those regions. Although the first duty of any intelligence officer is to respond to policymakers' requests, the duties also include anticipating policymakers' future needs. With the administration's determination to go to war already painfully clear in 2002, I undertook these assessments to help policymakers, and those charged with executing their decisions, make sense of what they would be getting into after Saddam was gone.

The origin of these assessments was not advertised in the documents themselves. Although self-initiated analysis is an important and major part of the intelligence community's work, responsiveness to policymakers' requests tends to be seen as a more respectable measure of the community's relevance and worth. Fulfilling a request also helps to avoid mischievous accusations that intelligence officers are going out of their way to poke sticks in policymakers' eyes. So a common practice with self-initiated assessments--certainly for those of us on the National Intelligence Council (NIC)--was to solicit the interest of a policy office and its agreement to be listed on the document as the customer of record. For the assessments on Iraq, the State Department's Policy Planning Staff agreed to fill this role.

We worked on the assessments with no delusions. Our analysis was unlikely to derail the policy train. Even when we began our work, the administration was rushing headlong into war. Our more modest hopes were to provide useful in-sights to those in Baghdad and Washington who would face the extremely difficult task of managing the ensuing mess. Ultimately, the assessments received broad distribution at both senior and working levels, and there was no good reason they could not or should not have influenced the basic decision to go to war.

What We Knew

ANYONE WHO paid any attention to the assessments should have had grave doubts about that decision. The first "key judgment" of the assessment on challenges in post-Saddam Iraq was that the greatest difficulty would be building a stable and representative political system--a process that would be "long, difficult, and probably turbulent", amid an authoritarian political culture that does not foster liberalism or democracy. The next judgment was that any post-Saddam authority would face a "deeply divided society with significant chance that domestic groups would engage in violent conflict with each other unless an occupying force prevented them from doing so." This prospect was based on the incompatible goals of Sunni Arabs facing the loss of their long-standing privileged position, Shi'a seeking power commensurate with their majority status and Kurds intent on securing control over oil resources in northern Iraq.

The third judgment was that notwithstanding Iraq's oil, the country's economic options would be "few and narrow", with economic reconstruction requiring measures akin to a Marshall Plan. The fourth judgment spoke of the major outside assistance that would be required to meet humanitarian needs, with a refugee problem and civil strife combining to strain Iraq's already inadequate public services. And in direct contradiction to U.S. goals, the final judgment, which addressed foreign and security policies over the horizon, noted that Iraq's threat perceptions and self-image as a regional power would, without the right security guarantees, revive its interest in WMD. Making matters worse, the more...