"WE WERE ALL wrong, probably."  So concluded David Kay, who led the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq for six months in 2003. Kay was appointed by Tenet after Bush, while traveling to the Middle East in June 2003, discovered that no one was in charge of finding out what had happened to Saddam's weapons. "Are you in charge of finding WMD?" Bush had asked Paul Bremer, his Iraqi proconsul. No, said Bremer, he was not. Bush then asked General Franks. He said it wasn't his job either. Exasperated, Bush asked, "So who is in charge of finding WMD?" Aides cast puzzling looks until someone volunteered the name of Stephen Cambone, a little-known aide to Rumsfeld. "Who?" Bush asked.

Kay was the perfect person to head the search for the missing weapons. A fellow Texan who had supported George Bush's run for office as early as 1999, Kay had spent 20 years as a nuclear weapons inspector, including inside Iraq itself. It was Kay who had led the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections in the early 1990s that had discovered the extent of Saddam's nuclear program--whose broad scope had surprised so many, not least the IAEA and the CIA. Throughout the 1990s, Kay had become the kind of knowledgeable and dispassionate television analyst who, armed with technical details, convinced many that Saddam was up to no good. As he took up his appointment as the head of the newly formed Iraqi Survey Group in June 2003, Kay reassured his new bosses that "we will reach the goal of understanding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program, including where weapons are, where weapons may have been moved and the exact status of that program at the time the war commenced."

The Iraqi Survey Group consisted of some 1,400 military, intelligence, and scientific personnel. Its purpose was to consolidate the many intelligence collection operations under one roof to find out what had happened to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The group had the capability to dismantle or neutralize any weapons it found. It began by scouring the huge stacks of documents seized after Baghdad had fallen and interviewing the many Iraqis who worked in the weapons programs.

The Iraq Survey Group's effort lasted almost twenty months and cost more than $1 billion. The work proved difficult. After having interviewed three-quarters of the scientists, doctors, and engineers on a list that numbered in the thousands, Kay wondered whether they would find any weapons. "We have not yet found stocks of weapons," he told Congress in October 2003. "But we are not yet at the point where we can say definitively either that such weapon stocks do not exist or that they existed before the war and our only task is to find where they have gone. We are actively engaged in searching for such weapons based on information being supplied to us by Iraqis." And while no weapons had been found, Kay assured the nation that "we have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002."  In time, the full extent of Iraq's weapons programs would become clear.

Three months later, however, Kay had changed his tune. "We were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself here," he told the Senate.  He doubted any weapons would ever be found and resigned as head of the survey group. Kay's replacement as the head of the Iraq Survey Group was Charles Duelfer, who had spent almost all of the 1990s at the United Nations searching for Iraqi chemical and biological weapons and ballistic missiles.

In September 2004, Duelfer reported that there were no weapons of mass destruction--or active programs to produce them--and that Iraq had not pursued such efforts since shortly after the Gulf War ended and the UN weapons inspections began. "Iraq did not possess a nuclear device, nor had it tried to reconstitute a capability to produce nuclear weapons after 1991," Duelfer concluded. There was also no "evidence to show that Iraq sought uranium from abroad after 1991 or renewed indigenous production of such material--activities that we believe would have constituted an Iraqi effort to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program." As for chemical weapons, Duelfer concluded "that Iraq unilaterally destroyed its undeclared chemical weapons stockpile in 1991. There are no credible indications that Baghdad resumed production of chemical munitions thereafter." He arrived at the same conclusion for biological weapons: "Iraq abandoned its ambition to obtain advanced BW weapons quickly. ISG found no direct evidence that Iraq, after 1996, had plans for a new BW program or was conducting BW-specific work for military purposes. Indeed, from the mid-1990s, despite evidence of continuing interest in nuclear and chemical weapons, there appears to be a complete absence of discussion or even interest in BW at the Presidential level."

Duelfer's remarkable report on Iraq's non-existent weapons programs also explained why Saddam had behaved as if he possessed them: He was bluffing to keep his regime in power. "In Saddam's view," Duelfer concluded, "WMD helped to save the Regime multiple times. He believed that during the Iran-Iraq war chemical weapons had halted Iranian ground offensives and that ballistic missile attacks on Tehran had broken its political will. Similarly, during Desert Storm, Saddam believed WMD had deterred Coalition Forces from pressing their attack beyond the goal of freeing Kuwait." Maintaining the fiction that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction was especially important in keeping Iraq's neighbor, Iran, at bay. "All senior level Iraqi officials considered Iran to be Iraq's principal enemy in the region," Duelfer concluded. "The wish to balance Israel and acquire status and influence in the Arab world were also considerations, but secondary."  So the administration was right: Saddam did have something to hide. But what he was hiding was the fact that he did not have any weapons rather than the fact that he did.

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION quietly accepted Duelfer's conclusions about the absence of any Iraqi weapons programs. The Iraq Survey Group was shut down in January 2005. Two months later, Bush accepted the finding of his own presidential commission on weapons of mass destruction--namely, that the intelligence community had been "dead wrong in almost all of its prewar judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction"--without comment.   Yet, even if the president showed no interest in the answer, one fundamental question remained: Why had almost everyone been so wrong?

For the Iraq War's most vocal critics, the answer was simple: Bush and his advisers lied. This argument was a staple of anti-Bush weblogs and a theme of Michael Moore's box-office hit, Fahrenheit 9/11. The claim that the administration invented the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was also made by some Democratic lawmakers. "There was no imminent threat," Sen. Edward Kennedy told an interviewer in 2004. "This was made up in Texas, announced in January to the Republican leadership that war was going to take place and was going to be good politically. This whole thing was a fraud."  

The claim that the Bush administration knowingly misled the country into war overlooks one key fact: American policy makers believed that Iraq possessed weapons of massive destruction and posed a threat to the United States long before Bush took office. Bill Clinton's policy toward Baghdad proceeded from the belief that Iraq had and was willing to use weapons of mass destruction. "If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear," Clinton said in one of his many public comments on Iraq. "We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program."  Even in 2003, France, Germany, and other countries opposed to war did not question claims that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons or that it wanted to acquire nuclear weapons. They instead disputed the significance of Iraq's programs, the extent of Baghdad's progress, and the likelihood that Saddam would cooperate with terrorists.

At the heart of why so many people got Iraq's weapons program wrong lay a massive intelligence failure with roots in when information was collected and, more worrisome, in how it was analyzed. While top administration officials frequently claimed that their intelligence was current, most of the information that analysts pored over in 2002 and 2003 had been collected years earlier. Richard Kerr, a former deputy director of central intelligence who headed an internal CIA panel that reviewed prewar intelligence analysis, concluded that the available information consisted of "a base of hard evidence growing out of the lead-up to the first war [in 1991], the first war itself, and then the inspections process," which ended in 1998. "There were pieces of new information but not a lot of hard information, and so the products that dealt with WMD were based heavily on analysis drawn out of that earlier period."  In fact, after UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in 1998 the CIA only had four reporting sources inside Iraq, none of whom had access to or knowledge of Iraqi weapons activities. "We did not ourselves penetrate the inner sanctum," Tenet acknowledged in February 2004. "Our agents were on the periphery of WMD activities."

What the intelligence community knew about Iraqi weapons activity after inspectors left Iraq was sketchy. It knew that Iraq had acquired dual-use materials and production facilities that might be used for illicit purposes. It could compare this information with its fairly extensive understanding of Iraq's pre-1991 nuclear, chemical, biological, and missile programs, as well as with what it had learned from UN weapons inspectors. Beyond that, intelligence analysts were left to speculate about Iraq's activities.

The intelligence community conveyed its uncertainties in its assessments of Iraq's weapons programs before 2002. For instance, in 2001 the CIA concluded that Iraq "probably continued at least low-level theoretical R&D" on nuclear weapons technologies and that "Baghdad may be attempting to acquire materials that could aid in reconstituting its nuclear weapons program."  With respect to chemical weapons, the conservative Defense Intelligence Agency concluded even as late as September 2002 that "there is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons, or where Iraq has--or will--establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities."  Similar caveats appeared in the CIA's assessment of Iraq's bioweapons program. "We are concerned that Iraq may again be producing biological warfare agents."  There were worries and concerns, but nothing definitive. And the intelligence community made sure that policymakers knew the difference.

The caveats disappeared in the summer of 2002. The more categorical tone was especially evident in the National Intelligence Estimate that was produced in two, hurried weeks that September. Stewart Cohen, the acting chairman of the National Intelligence Council who oversaw the drafting of the estimate, wanted to avoid a document full of qualifications. If the major findings used words such as maybe, probably, or likely, Cohen argued, the intelligence estimate would be "pablum."  And so the estimate's "Key Judgments" used direct, unvarnished language: Iraq "has chemical and biological warfare agents," Baghdad "is reconstituting its nuclear program," and "all key aspects--research & development, production, weaponization--of Iraq's offensive biological weapons program are active and most elements are larger and more advanced than they were before the Gulf War."  All of these claims overstated what the intelligence community in fact knew.  As David Kay told Bush when the president asked him why everyone had been so wrong.  "People connected the dots without collecting the dots," Kay explained. "The most dangerous thing you can do is connect the dots when you haven't collected the dots. You build a universe that is fact-free."

The intelligence community's enthusiasm to see what was not there was driven by political and organizational dynamics. Just as generals fight the last war, intelligence analysts lived with the memory of the community's past failures. In 1991, analysts had been surprised by how far Iraq had progressed in building a nuclear bomb. They had also failed to foresee India's decision to test a nuclear weapon in 1998 and to connect the dots before September 11--failures for which the intelligence community had been roundly criticized. It did not want to make the same mistake yet again, especially when no one--not the administration, not Congress, not the broader public--was asking it to consider the heretical idea that Iraq was bluffing. Indeed, the fact that Saddam behaved as if he were guilty made it easy for analysts to assume that he was. Thus the failure of UN inspectors in late 2002 and early 2003 to find illicit weapons was simply more evidence of how clear Baghdad had been in concealing its programs. As often happens in life, whatever evidence the intelligence community turned up substantiated what it was looking to prove.

Of course, some people were more than happy to supply evidence corroborating the intelligence community's operating premise. The Iraqi National Congress, an exile organization headed by Ahmad Chalabi, produced a steady stream of defectors with supposed inside knowledge of Iraq's weapons programs. Some of the most spectacular information about these programs, including that Iraq had deployed mobile biological weapons production labs, was provided by people associated with Chalabi's organization. Much of it turned out to be flawed. "The sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and in some cases, deliberately misleading," Powell later complained.  Of course, the truth about Iraq's weapons never much mattered to those who knowingly supplied false information. "We are heroes in error," Chalabi told a British newspaper in February 2004. "As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important."  

PRESIDENT BUSH AND his advisers could have probed the uncertainties in the intelligence community's assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. A careful reading of the classified intelligence estimate--though not of the publicly released version--would have alerted them to important disagreements among intelligence agencies over the state of Iraq's weapons capabilities. But few senior policy makers (or senators or representatives, for that matter) bothered. Bush did not read the estimate, and neither did Rice. Nor did they "read footnotes in a 90-page document," a senior White House aide later explained. "The national security adviser has people that do that."  These footnotes, of course, were not technical asides. They represented fundamental judgments, by the most qualified people, about the nature of the threat facing the nation and thus about whether war, especially preventive war, would be a justifiable response.

Instead of exploring evidence that cast doubt on Iraq's progress, administration officials chose to emphasize evidence that painted the darkest picture.  Take just two examples.  In October 2002, Bush warned that Iraqi was equipping unmanned aerial vehicles to spray chemical or biological agents and "exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States."  Yet, the Air Force had concluded a year earlier that Iraq's efforts to make pilotless planes capable of delivering biological or chemical agents were going nowhere. "We were pretty sure this thing was dead," recounted Bob Boyd, the Air Force's senior intelligence analyst.  Instead, the Air Force concluded, that these planes were most likely intended for reconnaissance missions. That assessment was included as a footnote in the classified National Intelligence Estimate, but not in the unclassified version that was publicly released in early October 2002.

Then there was the claim--repeated by Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, and other administration officials--that there was conclusive evidence that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program. However, that view was vigorously questioned by the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, which argued that the available evidence did not "add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing...an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons."  This assessment also appeared as a footnote in the classified estimate--and it, too, was dropped from the public version. The same was true of the technical judgment by Energy Department experts that the thousands of aluminum tubes Iraq sought to acquire were ill-suited for making centrifuges' rotors used to enrich uranium, as the CIA insisted was their purpose. That judgment was similarly relegated to a footnote, and not made public.

Bush and his senior advisers never bothered with exploring these disagreements within the intelligence community because they were convinced that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction--and, indeed, that he was expanding his arsenal. As all of them argued repeatedly, Saddam had used weapons of mass destruction, he had consistently lied about what he had done, and he had repeatedly obstructed the UN weapons inspection efforts to uncover the truth about his weapons programs. Given this history, who could doubt that Saddam had exploited the UN inspectors' four-year absence to reconstitute his weapons programs? "There's no doubt in my mind," Bush said in July 2003, "when it's all said and done, the facts will show the world the truth. There's absolutely no doubt in my mind."

No one was more convinced that Iraq possessed an expanding weapons program than the vice president. That conviction drove how he read the intelligence data. In September 2002, Cheney admitted that "we don't have all the evidence. We have 10 percent, 20 percent, 30 percent. We don't know how much." But that did not stop him from drawing definitive conclusions. "We know we have a part of the picture. And that part of the picture tells us that he [Saddam Hussein] is, in fact, actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons."  When new information emerged that called this assessment into question, Cheney questioned the source of the new information rather than consider its implications. So when the International Atomic Energy Agency concluded that documents purporting to show Iraq had sought to buy uranium from Niger were forged, Cheney rejected the idea. "I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong," he said of the agency's managing director. "If you look at the track record of the International Atomic Energy Agency on this kind of issue, especially where Iraq's concerned, they have consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing. I don't have any reason to believe they're any more valid this time than they've been in the past."  And it wasn't only international organizations Cheney dismissed. Long after most American analysts had concluded that two trailers found in Iraq after the war were used for conventional purposes rather than to produce bioweapons, Cheney insisted that the vehicles were "conclusive evidence, if you will, that he did in fact have programs of mass destruction."  

The administration's willingness to ignore dissenting views within the intelligence community also reflected a conviction, borne out of historical experience, that intelligence agencies typically underestimate threats to the United States. Paul Wolfowitz had come to this view early as a young analyst in the Team B exercise. Donald Rumsfeld shared it. Their work on a 1998 congressional commission that examined the ballistic missile threat to the United State only hardened their conviction that intelligence agencies regularly missed threats. Just weeks after the commission released its report, North Korea fired a long-range missile that the intelligence community said it was years away from developing.

Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz's conviction that intelligence agencies chased threats rather than anticipated them shaped their approach to threat analysis. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, they created the Office of Special Plans with the express mission of proving what they knew to be true--that Iraq had close ties to al Qaeda and was bent on acquiring the nuclear bomb on top of the significant stocks of chemical and germ weapons it already possessed. The office generated much of the information linking Iraq to terrorists--including to al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks. Some of that information made it to the White House--thus substantiating the belief that Saddam Hussein represented what Cheney called a "mortal threat" to the United States.

What reinforced the confidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that the intelligence community underestimated the threat was the firm belief after 9/11 that America could not afford to risk being wrong again. As Rumsfeld later explained, the United States "did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass murder. We acted because we saw the existing evidence in a new light, through the prism of our experience on September 11th."  Saddam was a madman. He had started two wars and brutally killed hundreds of thousands of his own people. He had gassed the Kurds living on Iraqi soil--and countless Iranians during eight years of bloody war. He had sponsored terrorism and associated with terrorists linked to al Qaeda. He had come close to building a nuclear bomb and was desperately seeking to make sure that next time he would succeed. To Bush and his senior advisers, Saddam had to be stopped. "Do we believe it is our responsibility to wait for a chemical or biological or even nuclear September 11th or is it the responsibility of free people to take steps to deal with the threat before we are attacked," Rumsfeld asked a congressional committee in September 2002? "There are a number of terrorist states pursuing weapons of mass destruction--Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria, just to name a few--but no terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq."  For all the uncertainty that may have existed about Iraq's capabilities and Saddam's intentions, the need to preempt a possible nuclear 9/11 evidently trumped all.

AMERICA WENT TO war with Iraq for one overriding reason--because it believed Baghdad had weapons of mass destruction and was prepared to use them. Two years after Saddam's statue fell in Firdos Square it was clear that his regime had not constituted an imminent threat to the United States. Nor was the threat it posed "unique and urgent," "mortal," "grave and growing," "most dangerous," "terrible," "serious and mounting," "immediate" or any of the other adjectives Bush and his senior advisers used in the months before the war.  Whatever Saddam's desires, by the time the war started he did not have the capability to threaten his own people or his neighbors, let alone the United States, with chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. Even if Iraq's ties to al Qaeda were as strong as many administration officials claimed--and they were not--it had no mass destruction capabilities to give to terrorists wishing to strike the United States.

Saddam's capabilities were limited because Washington's decade-long strategy of containing him through a combination of economic sanctions and weapons inspections (always backed by the possible use of force) had worked. Powell had been right in February 2001 when he said about Saddam that "we have kept him contained, kept him in a box."  Saddam had destroyed his weapons of mass destruction capabilities because he worried that if they were detected the sanctions would be prolonged and his regime further weakened. He had been helped in his goal of evading sanctions by a combination of non-compliance, bribery, and Security Council exhaustion. But in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Powell had succeeded in shoring up the sanctions regime and the Security Council consensus behind it.

The success of weapons inspections had surprised even their most ardent supporters. During the first round of inspections between 1991 and 1998, UN inspectors found and destroyed 50 long-range missiles and warheads (some filled with anthrax), 40,000 chemical warfare munitions, 690 tons of chemical warfare agents, 3,000 tons of precursor chemicals, significant quantities of chemical and biological warfare production equipment, and critical components and facilities for making weapons-grade nuclear materials.  When inspectors returned for a second time in late 2002 they visited 600 sites, including 44 facilities that had never before been inspected, in three months. They discovered some undeclared items--including extended-range ballistic missiles and rocket warheads that could have been used to deliver gas or germ warfare agents--and all were destroyed.  A few months of additional inspections would likely have allowed the UN to reach the same conclusion the Iraq Survey Group did almost two years later--that Saddam Hussein had effectively disarmed in the early 1990s.

It is doubtful that Bush and his advisers would have accepted such a conclusion. Their view of Iraq rested on a few, unshakeable assumptions: Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and was seeking to acquire more. Saddam intended to strike the United States. Saddam knew how to outwit weapons inspections run by the multilateral version of Inspector Clouseau. All these assumptions turned out to be wrong.

[pp. 150-160 of the revised edition]