One reason seems to be that the United States studied Iraq the way we study the moon: Many years ago, we sent men there to make observations. More recently we were content to gaze from afar, photographing it from space, monitoring it with instruments. The problem with this approach is that while the moon is made of stone, Iraq is made of people.
We needed good information on what Iraqis -- both leaders and commons -- were thinking and doing. We didn't get it.
After the Persian Gulf War in 1991, the Senate report says, the U.S. relied so heavily on U.N. weapons inspectors to collect information on Iraq's WMD programs we failed to develop our own human intelligence capability in that area. When Saddam Hussein expelled the U.N. inspectors in 1998, we were flying blind.
"The Intelligence Community did not have a single HUMINT (human intelligence) source collecting against Iraq's weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after 1998," says the report.
How did that happen?
"When Committee staff asked why the CIA had not considered placing a CIA officer in Iraq years before Operation Iraqi Freedom to investigate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs, a CIA officer said, 'because it's very hard to sustain . . . it takes a rare officer to go in . . . and survive scrutiny . . . for a long time,'" said the report. "The Committee agrees that such operations are difficult and dangerous, but they should be within the norm of the CIA's activities and capabilities. Senior CIA officials have repeatedly told the Committee that a significant increase in funding and personnel will be required to enable the CIA to penetrate difficult HUMINT targets similar to prewar Iraq. The Committee believes, however, that if an officer willing and able to take such an assignment really is 'rare' at the CIA, the problem is less a question of resources than a need for dramatic changes in a risk averse corporate culture."
If the committee's assessment is accurate, it means that based on WMD intelligence the CIA did not risk officers to collect in Iraq, the U.S. military put 130,000 troops in harm's way there.
Since 1998, we have had administrations controlled by both parties and Senate Intelligence Committees controlled by both parties. Politicians of both parties ought to have questioned the CIA aggressively enough to discover its weakness in Iraq and pressure the agency to fix it. Now both parties must make sure it doesn't happen again.