The Right Stuff - What the CIA Got Right in Iraq

Summary: On May 25th of this year the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released redacted versions of two community-coordinated assessments about Iraq that the intelligence community had produced in the months prior to the war. These reports addressed directly much of what we see in Iraq today: instability, conflict, refugee problems, and exploitation of the conflict by Al-Qaeda and other terrorists.
Paul R. Pillar, who initiated these two reports and supervised their drafting and coordination, will discuss his recent article “The Right Stuff” published in The National Interest. In this important article, he tells the story of the pre-war assessments and assesses the reports’ implications for the current debate over Iraq policy, the making of national security policy, and the politicization of evaluations of the intelligence community’s performance.