Five Big American Blunders in Terror War

Failing to learn from the past may not always condemn us to repeat it, as George Santyana famously suggested, but it does mean our journey forward will be rougher. With that in mind, here are five lessons for the struggle ahead, based on the experience of the last three years.

First: Beware the Next Big Thing.

On the military side of the war on terrorism, the Next Big Thing has been U.S. Special Forces. President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld jumped to embrace special operations in the Afghanistan war and expected them to play a substantial role in rooting out Iraqi die-hards. At first, the ninja warriors did seem to personify 21st century military transformation. And the shadowy, no-rules ethic of special ops nicely paralleled the president's "bring 'em to justice" thinking.

But the special operations strategy is essentially a SWAT team approach: Highly trained operators swoop down on the enemy and clean house. It works well for the police, because the bad guys are usually holed up somewhere. You can't surround a whole city or country, though. By the time we kick in the doors, the bad guys have often scattered. Or they were never at that particular address to begin with; witness the still-futile search for Osama bin Laden and Mullah Mohammed Omar.

Second: What you don't know can be bad, but what you think you know can be worse.

Administration officials have tied themselves in knots trying to explain why they were so sure Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Faulty intelligence is the scapegoat these days.

Certainly the intelligence community has shortcomings, and its senior officials happily joined the groupthink syndrome by shading their assessments to fit their bosses' preconceptions. But the truth was not hard to come by at the time. Two weeks before the Iraq war in March 2003, I wrote, "There is simply no hard intelligence of any such Iraqi weapons." That statement remains uncontrovertible. The proof of what intelligence analysts really knew -- and didn't know -- was revealed by the fact, reported in my column then, that "there is not a single confirmed biological or chemical target on their lists, Air Force officers working on the war plan say."