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How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?I didn't realize how incompetent the Bush administration could be.

By Jeffrey Goldberg
Posted Wednesday, March 19, 2008, at 2:48 PM ET

Editor's Note: To mark the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Slate has asked a number of writers who originally supported the war to answer the question, "Why did we get it wrong?" We have invited contributions from the best-known "liberal hawks," many of whom participated in two previous Slate debates about the war, the first before it began in fall of 2002, the second in early 2004. We will be publishing their responses through the week. Read the rest of the contributions.

August Hanning. Click image to expand.

How did I get Iraq wrong?

Well, for one thing, I trusted the Germans. Those who know me will find this statement somewhat ironic, but there it is.

I trusted one German in particular. His name was August Hanning. In the run-up to the war, he was the chief of the BND, the German foreign-intelligence agency. I met him shortly before the war at the new chancellery building opposite the Reichstag in Berlin. He was spectrally thin and exceedingly sober. His briefcase was the size of a microwave oven. I pictured many consequential documents sequestered inside.

Despite his cautious nature, Hanning neither hemmed nor hawed when I raised the subject of Saddam's nuclear program: "It is our estimate that Iraq will have an atomic bomb in three years," he said, on the record and for attribution.

Apart from Kenneth Pollack's book The Threatening Storm, nothing did more to convince me of the national-security necessity of the Iraq war than Hanning's statement. The BND had apparently developed a good deal of information about what was happening inside Iraq, in part because German companies, especially those that manufactured so-called dual-use products—ones that had both civilian and military applications—did disproportionate business in Baghdad. And Hanning seemed particularly credible to me because his analysis so obviously cut against the desires of his bosses. Then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder was vociferously opposed to armed intervention in Iraq. Hanning, in other words, was behaving in precisely the manner in which intelligence analysts should behave. He laid out the truth as he saw it, taking no notice of the personal consequences. To Schröder's credit, Hanning was allowed to share his intelligence with the CIA, and by doing so he helped buttress the Anglo-American case for war.

He was, of course, wrong. Did this make him a liar? No. It made him an intelligence official. Did this make Gerhard Schröder smart? No. It made him lucky. August Hanning was a smart, honest man who made a mistake.

If one of my mistakes was to trust men like August Hanning, another larger mistake was to put my trust in the Bush administration, not so much on matters of intelligence—faulty intelligence was a near-universal phenomenon—but on matters of basic competence. I will admit to a prejudice here: I believed—note the tense, please—that Republicans were by nature ruthless, unsentimental, efficient, and, most of all, preoccupied with winning. It simply never occurred to me that Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney would allow themselves to lose a war. Which is what they have very nearly done.

The scales fell from my eyes gradually. There was one moment, though—well after the replacement of Saddam's evil regime by the chaos of the Bush regime—that I recall as the end of this particular illusion. I was interviewing Paul Wolfowitz, who was then the deputy secretary of defense, at the New School in New York, as part of the New Yorker Festival in the fall of 2003. The audience was excessively unruly; various protesters were ejected from the hall, some after shouting "Sieg Heil" at Wolfowitz. One of these self-marginalizing protesters actually did a running goose step down the aisle until he was tackled by police officers. It felt, at certain moments, as if we had become trapped in a guerrilla theater production of The Producers.

This is all by way of explaining that, considering his audience, Wolfowitz did a credible job of keeping his head. But he did not instill a feeling that the administration had a plan in place to manage the Middle East. The key moment came when I asked Wolfowitz whether it was possible that newly democratized Arab countries could wind up voting Islamists into power. Wolfowitz responded, "Look, 50 percent of the Arab world are women. Most of those women do not want to live in a theocratic state. The other 50 percent are men. I know a lot of them. I don't think they want to live in a theocratic state."

Shit, I thought.

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Jeffrey Goldberg is a national correspondent for the Atlantic and the author of Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror.
Photograph of August Hanning by Sean Gallup/Getty Images.
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