“If the entire body of official intelligence analysis on Iraq had a policy implication, it was to avoid war—or, if war was going to be launched, to prepare for a messy aftermath.”

From “Intelligence, Policy, and the War in Iraq,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006 by Paul Pillar

Position: National Intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, CIA
Tenure: 2000 to 2005

Now a visiting professor in the Security Studies program at Georgetown University, Paul Pillar is a 28-year veteran of the CIA. From 2000-2005, he was National Intelligence officer for Near East and South Asia, the agency’s lead analyst in counterterrorism. Pillar holds undergraduate degrees from Dartmouth and Oxford and a doctorate from Princeton.

After September 11, 2001, Pillar was on the front lines of an intelligence community besieged by requests from an administration bent on finding connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda where none existed. Turning standard practice “upside down,” Pillar wrote, the administration used intelligence “not to inform decision making, but to justify a decision already made” to invade Iraq.

In an interview, Pillar said that September 11 “provided the mood, the context,” for attacking Iraq, and that if this mood were to be exploited, “this linkage between this horrible event of international terrorism and Saddam’s regime. . . would have to be established, emphasized, as much as possible.” According to Pillar, capitalizing on the post-September 11 mood, the administration would not hear CIA assessments that “war and occupation would boost political Islam and increase sympathy for terrorists’ objectives—and Iraq would become a magnet for extremists from elsewhere in the Middle East.”

Before the war, wrote Pillar, the CIA had “forecast that in a deeply divided Iraqi society, with Sunnis resentful over the loss of their dominant position and Shiites seeking power commensurate with their majority status, there was a significant chance that the groups would engage in violent conflict. . . . And it anticipated that a foreign occupying force would itself be the target of resentment and attacks—including by guerrilla warfare—unless it established security and put Iraq on the road to prosperity in the first few weeks or months after the fall of Saddam.”

The CIA assessment on consequences of war in Iraq was ignored. The administration, Pillar recounted, “went to war without requesting—and evidently without being influenced by—any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq.”