"Pillar, who was largely responsible for Iraq intelligence, wrote about the Senate Intelligence Committee’s release of two reports that were authored by the National Intelligence Council, under Pillar’s direction, in January 2003: Principal Challenges in Post-Saddam Iraq and Regional Consequences of Regime Change in Iraq. Pillar begins with an admission that the intelligence community was wrong about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.
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Putting all of this together, is it fair for Pillar to suggest that his reports demonstrated that the war against Saddam’s Iraq was a “fool’s errand?” I think not. Everyone knew that bringing freedom and democracy to the Arab Middle East would not be easy. Through modern history, it has been hard to go wrong by predicting failure for any venture associated with the Arab world. But President Bush did not have the luxury of ignoring the Arabs, nor was he deceived by irrelevancies about Israel and the Palestinians. He was looking for a long-term solution to the problem if Islamic terrorism, and the Intelligence Council told him that Iraq possessed WMDs; that Iraq was supporting terrorist groups; that a post-Saddam Iraq would have little reason to support terrorists; and that deposing Saddam could have a beneficent effect on other regimes throughout the region, including Iran’s. They reported that implanting democracy would be difficult, as everyone knew, but certainly didn’t suggest that it would be impossible. They noted a number of factors that made Iraq promising soil, by Arab standards, for the experiment.
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http://powerlineblog.com/archives/017904.php
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