After watching the excellent CNN Presents documentary "Dead Wrong" with David Ensor a few weeks back - it's about the President's commission on the intelligence failures leading up to the Iraqi war - it turns out it wasn't failure at all.
Instead, the case for invasion was a roaring success of warmongering spin, lies, cherrypicking and deception.
The chicken hawk neo cons of the Bush administration, who were salivating for war, drooling to send anybody's kids but their own to fight and die, needed a patsy to sell the case for war in Iraq to the world.
They needed someone beyond reproach. They needed a man with military and street cred. So they went to the only man with combat experience in the upper echelon of the Bush administration, the son of a Jamaican immigrant from Fox St. in the South Bronx, a guy who was educated in the rough-and-tumble public schools of New York City where 9/11 had happened, who graduated with a B.A. in geology from CCNY.
NY Daily News