This opinion piece is very poorly researched and extremely biased. Almost all of the references are to far-left opinion pieces that themselves were written without knowledge of the substance and complexities of the NIE. Much of the piece is an unedited reprint of an opinion piece that ignores the realities of world politics. The author does not even know that as a result of the liberation of Iraq most of the Arab countries (except for Syria) are aligned with the U.S. where they were aligned against us (except for Jordan and Egypt) in 2000. Saddam is no longer throwing people into industrial meat grinders and using oil money to bribe various national leaders and U.N. officials. What good about the 1980s with a million people killed in the Iran-Iraq war? Nobody wants those terrible situations back. It is not a zero-sum game as the author claims.