The Daily Populous Sunday April 5th, 2026 evening edition
Authored by theatlantic.com and submitted by theatlantic

In 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.

“Your 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.

“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 Iran’s regional retaliation was not exactly a surprise. “I can’t say that we anticipated necessarily that’s exactly how they would react, but we knew it was a possibility,” he said at a press conference on March 10.

Before the war, officials from two Arab countries told Trump and his top aides that they worried Iran could launch counterattacks on them, in order to halt the flow of oil, drive up prices, and trigger a global economic crisis, Politico reported. In early February, as U.S. warships were moving into position, I met with several of Qatar’s senior government officials. The likelihood of an Iranian reprisal was top of mind. One official pointed out the obvious, that a war could make it impossible for Qatar to produce and ship liquefied natural gas, the foundation of its economy. That’s exactly what happened.

After conducting its own war-gaming, one of the United States’ closest intelligence-sharing partners in Europe determined that a major American attack would compel Iran to hit countries in the Gulf and try to close the strait, an official in that government recently told me on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive assessment. The Americans were aware of those conclusions, according to the official, who was baffled that Trump claimed to be surprised.

Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee were also nonplussed, and angry, when Gabbard appeared before them last month. “There seems to be a discrepancy between what the intelligence community has reported over the years and what the president has said in terms of this action” in Iran, Senator Angus King, an independent from Maine, said. “And my question is, did you tell him?”

Gabbard avoided answering directly. But she said that the agencies she oversees had provided Trump “with the intelligence related to this operation in Iran, before and on an ongoing basis.” CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who was also present, said that he had participated in “dozens and dozens of briefings with the president,” including in the weeks before the war. He emphasized that “Iran had specific plans to hit U.S. interests in energy sites across the region.” Gabbard backed him up, noting that “this has long been an assessment of the IC that Iran would likely hold the Strait of Hormuz as leverage,” using a shorthand to refer to the intelligence community.

Senators were also keen to understand why one of Gabbard’s top deputies had quit his job over the president’s decision to go to war. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,” Joe Kent, whom Trump had nominated to run the National Counterterrorism Center, wrote in his resignation letter, a revealing statement from an official who had access to some of the most highly classified intelligence in the U.S. government. Ratcliffe told the committee that he disagreed with Kent and that Iran maintained an aspiration to build a nuclear weapon. But that is not the same thing as actually building one and preparing to use it, as Trump has claimed Iran was doing.

Read: An Army shake-up in the middle of a war

Senator Jon Ossoff, a Democrat from Georgia, read aloud a portion of a White House statement from the day after the war began: Trump had ordered “a military campaign to eliminate the imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime.” He asked Gabbard: Had the intelligence community assessed that the threat was imminent?

The intelligence director, who had taken passionately anti-war stances as a member of Congress, walked an awkward line. She told Ossoff that the president is “the only person who can determine what is and is not an imminent threat,” and that doing so was not the intelligence community’s job. In fact, it is precisely the job of the intelligence community to make that determination. But putting Gabbard’s evasive characterization aside, she said that “Iran maintained the intention to rebuild and to continue to grow their nuclear enrichment capability.” What she didn’t mention: There is a world of difference between intention and imminent threat.

Plenty of presidents have dismissed the warnings and prognostications of their intelligence advisers, or simply not made time to hear them. When a stolen Cessna crashed on the South Lawn of the White House in 1994, some joked that it was flown by Bill Clinton’s CIA briefer, trying desperately to get a meeting with the president. At the other end of the spectrum, George W. Bush became obsessed with the minutiae of counterterrorism operations, keeping track of the various al-Qaeda members whom the CIA was hunting and killing.

Trump’s relationship with the intelligence community is more fraught than any of his predecessors’. As a candidate, he excoriated the agencies for their botched call on Iraq’s WMDs. As president, he has railed against a “deep state” that he claims has been out to get him for more than a decade. Trump has long said that he trusts his gut. He’ll know the war in Iran is over, he recently told an interviewer, “when I feel it, feel it in my bones.”

The U.S. intelligence community is neither designed nor equipped to restrain a president who is moved by impulse, emotion, and his own feelings. It can only provide him with information. When the president disregards what he’s told, or distorts it, that failure is his alone.

kjr2k96 on April 5th, 2026 at 14:26 UTC »

I hate the headline. In the article, they go on to say that it was the Trump administration that mishandled intelligence. Why can’t we just say that? Why dance around the issue? Trump is running a clown show just like his businesses. He’s a better entertainer than a leader.

Trump does not believe in process. He doesn’t like any information that challenges his thoughts. He’s a wannabe authoritarian and that’s not even that good at holding power. This is consequences of hiring loyalty over expertise. This administration is incompetent, let’s just say that.

AlerteGeo_OSINT on April 5th, 2026 at 13:57 UTC »

The Iraq-Iran intelligence parallel is apt, but the article hints at something more structurally troubling that deserves unpacking. The post-Iraq reforms (ODNI creation, the ICD 203 analytic standards, red-teaming requirements) were all designed to prevent the IC from being wrong. They succeeded. The problem is that no institutional reform can prevent a decision-maker from ignoring correct assessments.

This mirrors the Israeli intelligence failure before October 7 in an instructive way. Aman had Hamas's actual operational plan more than a year before the attack. The analysis was accurate and specific. Leadership dismissed it as aspirational rather than operational. The product existed; the failure was at the consumer level. The IC term for this is "receptivity failure" as opposed to "collection failure" or "analytic failure."

The deeper question is whether the U.S. system has any mechanism to address this category of failure. The intelligence community can refine its tradecraft endlessly, but it cannot force a president to read the PDB, believe what it says, or act on it. The Kent resignation from NCTC, which happened right as Epic Fury was being planned, removed one of the few remaining institutional voices that might have insisted on analytic rigor reaching the decision-making level. That timing alone deserves more scrutiny.

justlurkshere on April 5th, 2026 at 13:57 UTC »

Failure of intelligence, yes. Failure of the intelligence community, remains to be seen.