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Listen − 1.0 x + Seek 0:00 14:28 I n 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. “Y our 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. Read: Trump’s fateful choice “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 Ira