Intelligence failures about Iraq

The American war on Iraq will remain captive to having fallen into the trap of a wrong and hasty political decision because it depended on inaccurate information. The debate under way now in the United States and Britain about the intelligence role in both countries in identifying the threat posed by Saddam's Iraq ... is the strongest indication that the political decision made by Washington to wage the war was not accurate.

President Bush, under Democratic pressure, talked about the matter. But he surprised everyone by saying that (after the war) America was safer, Iraq was better off and the world more stable. He thus focused on the results of the war and not on the accuracy of the political decision in the first place.

So what drove Bush to war? Most likely, the narrow political calculations of White House hawks to control and build the American Empire, calculations that are known and understood only by them and not anyone else. -- Al-Ahram, Cairo, Egypt