Both 41 and 43 were very good at putting together coalitions. They knew how to fight a war. What to do after the war, not so much. The big mistake was trusting these Intelligence agencies. The ones that missed the Boston bomber even after the Russians warned them twice.
For the life of me, I cannot understand why Bush did not fire George Tenent.
Add Norman Minetta to that also (after 9/11).
It’s not a big leap to trust the agencies on Iraq’s possession of chemical and other proscribed weapons when Iraq had a history of using chemical weapons, declared stocks, were definitively caught hiding further stocks on a roughly annual basis which were tagged, inventoried, sampled, and in large amounts turned over for destruction. The only question was what happened to the stocks which weren’t turned over for destruction and were declared ‘lost or destroyed’ by Iraq itself...in an environment where they were not only not allowing coherent inspections, but in some cases deconstructing and removing entire suspected compounds and the buildings in them.
What kind of idiot assumes they were then complying and did indeed *secretly* destroy the materials they were under under violation of ceasefire supposed to have turned over?