ABSTRACT
Failure may be an orphan, but often it is a closely observed one. This is true for the misjudgment of Iraq’s programs weapons of mass destruction (WMD), featuring British, Australian, and American post-mortems, with the American intelligence community (IC) going furthest, formally retracting its estimate and conducting public as well as secret analyses of what went so wrong.2 As interesting as all these studies are, the very failure that occasioned them provides a context that we need to take account of. One review of some of the British reports put it well: ‘Inquiries are a continuation of politics by other means, as Clausewitz might have said. In the nature of the case, these inquiries were more political than most. They were steeped in high politics and played for high stakes.’3 If history is a guide, we should not expect too much. There were four
official investigations in the years following Pearl Harbor and while they made public much valuable information, they could not explain what had happened or settle the political debate.4
