Richard Perle ....
got this right (IMO):
Perle, however, follows this up with the argument that Iraqi governance ought to have been turned over to the "DoD Iraqi Exile Group" - Ahmad Chalabi and others. There are many negative takes on Chalabi (including the agency's burn notice of many years standing).(article linked by Schmedlap)
The seminal error was, in my view, the failure to turn Iraq over to the Iraqis immediately after Saddam’s regime collapsed. History does not allow instant replays so we will never know whether that policy could have averted the disastrous insurgency—carried out by Saddam loyalists and foreign jihadists—sustained by terror, the incitement of confessional and ethnic divisions, and outside assistance. Had Iraq been enabled to stand up an interim government pending free elections to be held in, say, eighteen months, we might well have escaped the invidious role of an occupier. In blundering from liberation to occupation, we opened the way to nearly five years of suffering that only now, with the progress of the “surge,” is finally subsiding.
One is found in Operation Hotel California, which is here - read the sans serif typeface portion by Sam Faddis & chose to ignore or read the rest by his co-author. Faddis tells quite a bit about the runup to Gulf II (OIF I) - AQ WMD production in Kurdistan, WMD intelligence from Iraq, incompetent Iraqi exiles, etc.
Sam Faddis has a blog - local home town type - which is here. This guy seems credible (also a fav comment by at least one ex-agency person who disagreed with him about Panetta).
PS: Sbee - I like Steve Cohen's stuff on Russia - which is a bit strange given my own politics. In any event, he is here and here - and quite a few other places.
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