This week marks the twentieth anniversary of America’s invasion of Iraq .

Aside from the enduring controversy over the war itself, there’s broad agreement that the U.S. intelligence community failed policymakers and the public by mistakenly assessing that Saddam Hussein’s repressive regime possessed weapons of mass destruction . It’s always easier to blame the spooks than admit that the White House screwed up something massive. Still, it cannot be denied that the intelligence community got this one wrong. That was the point of Michael Rubin's recent Washington Examiner column . He asserts, in part, that they "did what Washington should expect: circle the wagons and shirk responsibility."

While none can deny that spies, like surgeons, tend to bury their mistakes, Rubin’s statement is a tad harsh, given that in the aftermath of the Iraq WMD debacle, the intelligence community implemented far-reaching "after action" assessments in order to get it right the next time. Considering how accurately America’s intelligence agencies predicted Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it seems that this was a lesson that got learned.

All the same, Rubin’s essential depiction of how the intelligence community performed in 2003 is correct. Intelligence that reinforces preexisting biases tends to get amplified. As he put it: "There are multiple ways to generate intelligence, and two major ways are via the collection of signals intelligence (SIGINT), such as intercepting phone calls, and human intelligence (HUMINT), more traditional spies."

When multiple intelligence sources are telling you similar things — above all, that Saddam had WMDs ready to go — the spooks tend to accept that (especially when it’s what the White House wants to hear). As Rubin concludes, "In effect, the SIGINT supported the HUMINT and vice versa, leading the intelligence community to accept the worst-case scenario."

I was there, so I can attest that’s true — but it leaves out some important things.

In the run-up to our invasion of Iraq, I headed up a multi-agency intelligence task force that focused on the Iraqi military. Our focus wasn’t WMDs, per se, but of course we followed that issue, since it was the Bush White House’s top intelligence priority in the fateful winter of 2002-2003. It wasn’t just American and Western intelligence agencies that believed Iraq had WMDs - top Iraqis believed it too. Saddam’s regime was a strange Stalinist-inspired labyrinth of lies, violence, and conspiracy theories. The Iraqi strongman respected President George H.W. Bush, his 1991 Gulf War foe, as a worthy adversary. In contrast, he rather simply regarded George W. Bush (whom he referred to privately as "Baby Bush") as a bumbling neophyte who was little more than a pawn of wealthy Zionists. Standard conspiracy stuff.

That said, telling Saddam truths that he didn’t want to hear was a good way to end your career and possibly your life. Senior security officials in Baghdad had a habit of getting executed or simply disappearing. Hence, senior intelligence and military officers in Baghdad consistently presented "the boss" with rose-tinted assessments of all matters, including armaments and WMDs. The key fact is that in the 1990s, Saddam’s regime executed a major denial and deception operation designed to convince Tehran — which was viewed by Baghdad as a greater threat to the regime than Washington — that Iraq possessed WMDs when, in reality, it no longer did.

This was a complex scheme involving intelligence deception over several years, and it worked well – in truth, far too well. As a result, when America invaded Iraq 20 years ago this week, its wasn’t just U.S. and Western intelligence that believed Saddam had WMDs, everybody did. It’s a strange fact that Russian intelligence, which partnered with Baghdad, likewise assessed that Iraq still possessed some WMDs.

Everybody got it wrong. Mainly because top Iraqi officials believed they still had WMDs, even though nobody knew any specifics. After we captured Baghdad I took part in a classified Pentagon program ( some of which was subsequently declassified and released to the public) to figure out what really happened. It turned out that virtually all captured Iraqi generals believed they possessed WMDs, too, though none of them said they saw them with their own eyes. This was institutionalized self-deception on a truly grand scale.

As a result, even the best intelligence in the world on the inner workings of the Saddam regime at the beginning of 2003 would have revealed that senior Iraqi decision-makers believed they possessed WMDs. That’s precisely what happened here. Institutional bias matters too. In the run-up to the 1991 Gulf War, the Central Intelligence Agency assessed that Saddam was several years away from getting a nuclear bomb. Inspections after the liberation of Kuwait revealed that Saddam had been much closer to having "the bomb" – perhaps as little as six months away. Therefore, the CIA’s bias the next time tended toward alarm. That’s also what happened a dozen years later.

Between our Iraq wars, Saddam’s once robust WMD programs withered away under the pressure of international sanctions. But we didn't know it.

We’ve gotten better since 2003. Although the Kremlin’s internal debates on invading Ukraine seem to have been as delusional as Saddam’s, including the badly mistaken belief that Kyiv would fall to Russian troops in a few days with the rest of Ukraine not far behind, American spies got the big picture right. Progress comes, even if slowly.

John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.