Has Obama Learned Anything From Iraq?

One obvious lesson is that intelligence on nuclear capabilities is notoriously unreliable. The Iraq war was fought on the basis of “one of the most public — and most damaging — intelligence failures in recent American history,” the Robb-Silberman commission concluded in 2005. On nuclear weapons, the intelligence community regularly has been caught by surprise, in Iran and Iraq but also in North Korea, Pakistan, India and the Soviet Union.