Iraq War Offers Lessons for Syria and Iran - NYTimes.com: Mr. Hadley told a small group gathered here to dissect the long-term lessons of the Iraq war that it never occurred to him or his boss, President George W. Bush, to ask: “What if Saddam is doing all this deception because he actually got rid of the W.M.D. and he doesn’t want the Iranians to know?”
Instead, the White House and the intelligence agencies leapt to the conclusion that Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader who had pursued so many weapons of mass destruction in the past, must still be on the same quest.
“It turns out that was the most important question in terms of the intelligence failure that never got asked,” Mr. Hadley told a discussion organized by the RAND Corporation and Foreign Policy magazine.
History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme, Mark Twain once said, and these days Washington is looking for the assonances. The Iraq experience hangs over every major decision Mr. Obama’s foreign policy team grapples with each day. It looms over the daily debate over whether to intervene – with heavy arms or greater covert action – in Syria. And it permeates the discussion about Iran’s nuclear progress, and particularly over whether Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has made a decision to pursue a bomb.
