"Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong"

This is one of many articles questioning the knowledge the U.S. government thought it had before going to war with Iraq last year, as compared with the knowledge the author thinks it has now. Kenneth M. Pollack was one of the hawks and was in the Clinton Administration's National Security Council.

What seems to emerge is a history in which U.S. intelligence was always wrong about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD): believing there were fewer WMD than was the case in the 1980's and early 1990's, and more WMD than there were thereafter. Indeed Pollack attributes some of the later errors as a reacion to some of the earlier ones -- the "fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me" syndrome.

He does raise the issue of (subtle and perhaps not inappropriate) pressures on the intelligence community from the Bush Administration to see WDM in Iraq.

The Atlantic | January/February 2004 | Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong | Pollack

Also published in the January/February 2004 ediition of the Atlantic Monthly is the following (which does not appear to be available yet online):

"Blind Into Baghdad"
The U.S. occupation of Iraq is a debacle not because the government did no planning but because a vast amount of expert planning was willfully ignored by the people in charge. The inside story of a historic failure
by James Fallows