Der Krieg im Iran ist ein Versagen der Geheimdienste

Shane Harris: “In 2005, a bipartisan commission of lawmakers and security experts concluded that ‘the Intelligence Community was dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.’ America’s spies had told President George W. Bush that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted a nuclear-weapons program and that Iraq possessed biological weapons and mobile production facilities, as well as stockpiles of chemical weapons. These supposed facts became the basis for a U.S. invasion and an eight-year occupation. ‘Not one bit of it could be confirmed when the war was over,’ the commission found. ‘This was a major intelligence failure.’ …

“Two decades ago, a president embraced information that turned out to be wrong, and disaster followed. Today, a president disregards assessments that proved to be right, and the predictable comes to pass. There’s a failure of intelligence there too—just not the kind we’re used to seeing …

“Some of Trump’s allies have criticized him for not making a public case for war, as the Bush administration did. But if he had accurately presented the intelligence, the facts would have argued against attacking Iran—or at least for not striking before the diplomatic options had been exhausted. Perhaps that’s why the president ignored, and later misrepresented, what his advisers told him …

“Trump’s relationship with the intelligence community is more fraught than any of his predecessors’. As a candidate, he excoriated the agencies for their botched call on Iraq’s WMDs. As president, he has railed against a ’deep state’ that he claims has been out to get him for more than a decade. Trump has long said that he trusts his gut. He’ll know the war in Iran is over, he recently told an interviewer, ‘when I feel it, feel it in my bones.’

“The U.S. intelligence community is neither designed nor equipped to restrain a president who is moved by impulse, emotion, and his own feelings. It can only provide him with information. When the president disregards what he’s told, or distorts it, that failure is his alone.”

Read more: [https://theatln.tc/xTSsGoYW](https://theatln.tc/xTSsGoYW) 

The Iraq-Iran intelligence parallel is apt, but the article hints at something more structurally troubling that deserves unpacking. The post-Iraq reforms (ODNI creation, the ICD 203 analytic standards, red-teaming requirements) were all designed to prevent the IC from being *wrong*. They succeeded. The problem is that no institutional reform can prevent a decision-maker from ignoring correct assessments.

This mirrors the Israeli intelligence failure before October 7 in an instructive way. Aman had Hamas’s actual operational plan more than a year before the attack. The analysis was accurate and specific. Leadership dismissed it as aspirational rather than operational. The product existed; the failure was at the consumer level. The IC term for this is „receptivity failure“ as opposed to „collection failure“ or „analytic failure.“

The deeper question is whether the U.S. system has any mechanism to address this category of failure. The intelligence community can refine its tradecraft endlessly, but it cannot force a president to read the PDB, believe what it says, or act on it. The Kent resignation from NCTC, which happened right as Epic Fury was being planned, removed one of the few remaining institutional voices that might have insisted on analytic rigor reaching the decision-making level. That timing alone deserves more scrutiny.

Honestly? The war in Iran is a failure of Intelligence? No one ever wanted to attack Iran before 47 listened to Netanyahu. That tells me that that the intelligence was there telling people to not attack Iran. The failure was of Trump and Company’s leadership team’s mental acuity as their ignorance, hubris, and stupidity was and is on full display.