James P. Pfiffner
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Decisionmaking, intelligence, and the Iraq war
in Intelligence and national security policymaking on Iraq
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This chapter begins with an account of the run-up to the war in Iraq. It presents a critique of the national security decisionmaking process that led up to the war. President George H. W. Bush was aware of disagreements with his seeming intention to go to war, but most of these came from outside the administration. The chapter explains the role of intelligence and how it was used before the war. The administration was so convinced that Iraq was an imminent threat to the United States that it attempted to use the intelligence process to bolster its case for war. Intelligence may also have been politicized by pressure placed upon intelligence analysts to arrive at the conclusions favored by political levels of the Bush administration. The chapter also presents some lessons that might be learned about presidential decision making about going to war.

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