We hosted Ambassador Peter Galbraith at Cato last week discussing his book The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War without End. Although I’m not prepared to endorse everything that Galbraith advocates in the book, I am increasingly convinced that the central error in this war, an error that doomed the invasion and occupation to almost certain failure from the moment that it was conceived, was the complete ignorance about the sectarian divide within Iraq. This divide virtually ensured that Kurds would push for autonomy (at least) in the north, and that the Shia Arabs, reasonably secure in the south to establish a Shia theocracy, would then settle old scores and fight with the Sunni Arabs over the spoils in the rest of the country.

The theme that emerges from Galbraith’s book, and that is at the center of his proposal for dividing the country, is that Iraq is already divided. The Bush administration’s policy objective, of creating a democratic, unified Iraq, at peace with its neighbors and capable of defending itself, seeks to unite an already divided country, encouraging — nay, forcing — together disparate communities that want to be separate from one another.

There are troubling parallels to another ethnic conflict, one that Galbraith observed up close as ambassador to Croatia during the Clinton administration, as Galbraith notes in his book:

American policymakers are reflexively committed to the unity of Iraq, as they were to the unity of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. The conventional response to discussions of Iraq’s breakup is to say it would be destabilizing. This is a misreading of Iraq’s modern history. It is the holding of Iraq together by force that has been destabilizing.

In Yugoslavia in the spring of 1991, the United States and Europe put all their diplomatic energy into a doomed effort to keep the country together when they should have focused on preventing the war that followed.

We should have recognized these dynamics long ago. Many did. My colleague Ted Carpenter predicted in February 1999, that a bid to overthrow Saddam Hussein by force would ultimately have to come to grips with Iraq’s sectarianism. And that the breakup of Iraq, which was likely, was also likely to redound to Iran’s benefit.

But other outside commentators, as well as those experts within the government, were systematically written out of Iraq’s post-war planning. And with good reasons: if their warnings were taken seriously, it would have seriously challenged the central logic of the war – namely, that the benefits of action greatly outweighed the costs of action, that success was possible, even likely.

The advocates for this war were determined to cast doubt on the accurate picture of Iraq as a divided country. My colleague Justin Logan discovered one of the best examples. Bill Kristol Weekly Standard editor and co-author, with Lawrence Kaplan, of The Case for War Against Iraq, informed host Terry Gross on the NPR program “Fresh Air,” that “there’s been a certain amount of pop sociology in America…that the Shi’a can’t get along with the Sunni and the Shi’a in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There’s almost no evidence of that at all.”  The date when this segment aired was, appropriately enough, April Fool’s Day 2003.

At least Kristol wasn’t under oath. The same cannot be said for Douglas Feith. Galbraith notes:

“… in the testimony Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith gave to the House International Relations Committee on May 15, 2003 … [h]e told the committee ‘it appears that popular support for clerical rule is narrow, even among the Shia population. The Shiite tradition does not favor clerical rule…’ ”

“When pressed … Feith became vague ‘I do not have off the top of my head whether there’s polling data on that.’

As Galbraith observes dryly “There was no data to support Feith’s proposition because it wasn’t true.”

Very few people disputed that Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator. But there were warnings that Iraq would disintegrate into a cycle of violence following his removal from power. Others worried that a new government would be hostile toward the United States.

Given these pre-war predictions, journalists asked senior Bush administration officials how they would deal with such a government. During a one-on-one interview with the president, Tim Russert asked: “If the Iraqis choose…an Islamic extremist regime, would you accept that, and would that be better for the United States than Saddam Hussein?” The president replied: “They’re not going to develop that.”

He then revealed that his confidence stemmed from some special intelligence he received in a private conversation. “Right here in the Oval Office,” the president explained, “I sat down with Mr. Pachachi and Chalabi and al-Hakim, people . . . that have made the firm commitment” to “minority rights and freedom of religion.” “These people are committed to a pluralistic society.”

The three people in question – Ahmed Chalabi, Adnan Pachachi, and Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim – were, at the time, members of the Iraqi Governing Council appointed by the United States immediately after the collapse of Saddam’s regime.

These people, the president said, were committed to creating a liberal democracy. But, as it turns out, they wither were not representative of, or knowledgeable in, broader Iraqi opinion. Or, then again, perhaps they lied.

Before taking the country to war, the president argued that the costs of inaction outweighed the costs of action. His calculations assumed a smooth transition in post-Saddam Iraq to a liberal democratic government that harbored no ill will toward the United States. He based this presumption not on the opinions of area experts, but rather on the promise of three individuals whose credibility was open to challenge, and whose understanding of the situation on the ground in Iraq was based not on facts, but rather on conjecture, speculation, and wishful thinking.

For all the talk of so-called “intelligence failures” that intelligence failure is the greatest one of all.