By Shane Harris
Sunday, April 05, 2026
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.”
If a similar panel of experts scrutinized the run-up to
the current war in Iran, their assessment might go something like this:
The intelligence community was accurate and consistent
in its prewar judgments about Iran’s capabilities and intentions to attack the
United States and its allies. Contrary to what President Trump has said
to justify his decision, the intelligence showed that the Iranian regime was
not preparing to use a nuclear weapon; it did not have ballistic missiles
capable of reaching the United States; and in response to a U.S. military
attack, Iran was likely to strike at neighboring countries in the Persian Gulf
and try to close the Strait of Hormuz, precipitating a global economic crisis.
All of this was known before the war and presented to President Trump. This was
an intelligence success.
Trump’s “excursion,” as he calls the biggest U.S.
military operation of his second term, has unleashed a parade of horribles.
Iran now controls the strait, where it plans to charge vessels a toll and can
govern global flows of oil, natural gas, fertilizer, and chemicals that are
crucial for manufacturing. A regime that Trump claims to have replaced still
remains in the hands of hard-liners, whose repression of the Iranian people
will be strengthened for having survived a decapitation strike by the world’s only
superpower. And neighboring countries in the Gulf, whose livelihoods depend on
exporting energy and creating safe places for people to visit, live, and work,
will amass new weapons and reconsider their strategic partnerships with the
United States.
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.
***
“Your successes are unheralded—your failures are
trumpeted,” President John F. Kennedy remarked in a speech to CIA staff at
their headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, in 1961. Ever since, intelligence
officers have ruefully invoked that truism whenever they’re blamed for a major
screwup. The familiar storyline of an intelligence failure features analysts
who neglect to “connect the dots,” case officers who get seduced by sources who
exaggerate or lie, and politicians who contort ambiguous information to align
with their preferred outcome. That’s what happened in the months before the
Iraq War.
The lead-up to Operation Epic Fury turns this narrative
on its head. The spies called it right, but the president went another
direction. The failures of the intelligence community on Iraq’s WMDs produced
systemic changes meant to keep botched calls like that one from recurring. In
many respects, those reforms have worked. But they couldn’t account for a
decision maker who had been seduced by previous military successes into
thinking that the U.S. armed forces, under his inspired and perhaps divinely endowed
command, could never stumble.
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.
“The regime already had missiles capable of hitting
Europe and our bases, both local and overseas, and would soon have had missiles
capable of reaching our beautiful America,” Trump said before a Medal of Honor
ceremony at the White House on March 2. But the Defense Intelligence Agency had
concluded that building a missile that could hit the United States would take
Iran until 2035, and only then if it was determined to do so, which analysts
concluded it was not. When Director of National Intelligence Tulsi
Gabbard—hardly the model of an apolitical presidential adviser—testified
before Congress a few weeks later, she reported that Iran had missile
technology that “it could use to begin to develop a militarily viable ICBM
before 2035,” but did not say that it had done so. That timeline is crucial to
understand, because to hit the United States with the ultimate weapon, Iran
would have to place a nuclear warhead on top of an intercontinental ballistic
missile.
That threat was not years away, Trump insisted. Iran was
“going to take over the Middle East. They were going to knock out Israel with
their nuclear weapon,” he told reporters in the Oval Office on March 16. A
charitable reading might be that Trump believes Iran wants to use a nuclear
weapon. But desire, or even intention, does not equal capability.
It’s true that Iran possesses uranium that could
eventually be used to build a nuclear weapon, were it to be further enriched.
But in late June, U.S. bombers struck nuclear-related facilities in Iran, which
had made “no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability,”
Gabbard said in her written statement to Congress. “The entrances to the
underground facilities that were bombed have been buried and shuttered with
cement.” That’s not a picture of a country on the brink of using a nuclear weapon.
Trump not only has misstated intelligence about Iran’s
military potential. He has expressed surprise at the regime’s response to
American and Israeli bombing, particularly Iran’s closure of the Strait of
Hormuz and the heavy drone and missile attacks it has launched on its neighbors
in the Persian Gulf. But the president’s advisers had told him this was likely
to happen. They knew that restricting a shipping artery would give Iran a
chokehold on the world’s economy. It’s such a no-brainer maneuver that the Pentagon
has built it into its war
planning. When Trump’s military advisers apprised him of this possibility,
he appeared to have shrugged them off. Iran would probably capitulate before
trying to close the strait, he said, and in any event, he thought the military
could handle it, The
Wall Street Journal reported.
After threatening to bomb Iran if ships weren’t allowed
to travel freely, Trump now says other nations should bear the burden of
reopening the waterway. “The United States imports almost no oil through the
Hormuz Strait and won’t be taking any in the future,” Trump said in a primetime
address to the nation on Wednesday. “We don’t need it.” Oil prices rose
following his remarks.
Trump has also said that no one told him that Iran was
likely to attack Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and other Gulf
nations that are close allies of the United States and host vital military
bases. “They weren’t supposed to go after all these other countries in the
Middle East,” Trump said during a White House event on March 16. “Nobody
expected that. We were shocked.”
How could they be? In 2025, the U.S. intelligence
community publicly reported that “Iran’s large conventional forces are capable
of inflicting substantial damage to an attacker, executing regional strikes,
and disrupting shipping, particularly energy supplies, through the Strait of
Hormuz.” No less than Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, perhaps the war’s
biggest cheerleader in the administration, had to admit that Iran’s regional
retaliation was not exactly a surprise. “I can’t say that we anticipated necessarily
that’s exactly how they would react, but we knew it was a possibility,” he said
at a press conference on March 10.
Before the war, officials from two Arab countries told
Trump and his top aides that they worried Iran could launch counterattacks on
them, in order to halt the flow of oil, drive up prices, and trigger a global
economic crisis, Politico
reported. In early February, as U.S. warships were moving into position, I met
with several of Qatar’s senior government officials. The likelihood of an
Iranian reprisal was top of mind. One official pointed out the obvious, that a
war could make it impossible for Qatar to produce and ship liquefied natural
gas, the foundation of its economy. That’s exactly what
happened.
After conducting its own war-gaming, one of the United
States’ closest intelligence-sharing partners in Europe determined that a major
American attack would compel Iran to hit countries in the Gulf and try to close
the strait, an official in that government recently told me on the condition of
anonymity to discuss a sensitive assessment. The Americans were aware of those
conclusions, according to the official, who was baffled that Trump claimed to
be surprised.
***
Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee were also
nonplussed, and angry, when Gabbard appeared before them last month. “There
seems to be a discrepancy between what the intelligence community has reported
over the years and what the president has said in terms of this action” in
Iran, Senator Angus King, an independent from Maine, said. “And my question is,
did you tell him?”
Gabbard avoided answering directly. But she said that the
agencies she oversees had provided Trump “with the intelligence related to this
operation in Iran, before and on an ongoing basis.” CIA Director John
Ratcliffe, who was also present, said that he had participated in “dozens and
dozens of briefings with the president,” including in the weeks before the war.
He emphasized that “Iran had specific plans to hit U.S. interests in energy
sites across the region.” Gabbard backed him up, noting that “this has long
been an assessment of the IC that Iran would likely hold the Strait of Hormuz
as leverage,” using a shorthand to refer to the intelligence community.
Senators were also keen to understand why one of
Gabbard’s top deputies had quit
his job over the president’s decision to go to war. “Iran posed no imminent
threat to our nation,” Joe Kent, whom Trump had nominated to run the National
Counterterrorism Center, wrote in his resignation letter, a revealing statement
from an official who had access to some of the most highly classified
intelligence in the U.S. government. Ratcliffe told the committee that he
disagreed with Kent and that Iran maintained an aspiration to build a nuclear
weapon. But that is not the same thing as actually building one and preparing
to use it, as Trump has claimed Iran was doing.
Senator Jon Ossoff, a Democrat from Georgia, read aloud a
portion of a White House statement from the day after the war began: Trump had
ordered “a military campaign to eliminate the imminent nuclear threat posed by
the Iranian regime.” He asked Gabbard: Had the intelligence community assessed
that the threat was imminent?
The intelligence director, who had taken passionately
anti-war stances as a member of Congress, walked an awkward line. She told
Ossoff that the president is “the only person who can determine what is and is
not an imminent threat,” and that doing so was not the intelligence community’s
job. In fact, it is precisely the job of the intelligence community to
make that determination. But putting Gabbard’s evasive characterization aside,
she said that “Iran maintained the intention to rebuild and to continue to grow
their nuclear enrichment capability.” What she didn’t mention: There is a world
of difference between intention and imminent threat.
***
Plenty of presidents have dismissed the warnings and
prognostications of their intelligence advisers, or simply not made time to
hear them. When a stolen Cessna crashed on the South Lawn of the White House in
1994, some joked that it was flown by Bill Clinton’s CIA briefer, trying
desperately to get a meeting with the president. At the other end of the
spectrum, George W. Bush became obsessed with the minutiae of counterterrorism
operations, keeping track of the various al-Qaeda members whom the CIA was
hunting and killing.
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.
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