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including Arab forces. Thus the coalition would have shattered had we gone on to Baghdad. While that might not have mattered in the short term, by breaking our word then, we would have had an awful time trying to assemble another such coalition to deal with an international problem. Further, I made the point many times that Saddam was not just going to sit on his veranda and let U.S. forces drive up and arrest him. He would have goneto ground, and we would have had to occupy a significant part of Iraq in order to find him and/or defeat a determined and ruthless resistance movement that he almost certainly would have put together, with home field advantage.
    So the war ended in February 1991 with Saddam still in power, Iraq under severe international sanctions limiting imports and controlling the export of Iraqi oil, and the Shia and Kurds even more brutally repressed. In the ensuing years, Saddam did everything possible to evade the sanctions, diverting proceeds from the “oil-for-food” program (under which the Iraqi regime was allowed to sell just enough oil to buy food and medicine) into his own pocket and overseeing a vast operation smuggling oil across the border into Iran for sale. He used a lot of that money to build dozens more gigantic, tasteless palaces that we would later occupy.
    None of us doubted in the early 1990s that, just as soon as he could, Saddam would resume the programs he had had under way before the war to develop biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. The intensive inspections program instituted after the war uncovered evidence that the Iraqis had, in fact, been considerably further along in developing nuclear weapons than U.S. intelligence had estimated before the war. We were so confident he had deployed chemical weapons that our first troops to cross the border wore chemical protection suits (which were unbearably hot and uncomfortable even in February). As long as the inspections effort continued and the sanctions were strictly enforced, his opportunities to resume the programs for weapons of mass destruction would be very limited.
    But as the years went by, Saddam became much more aggressive in limiting the reach of the inspectors, and the inspections for all practical purposes ended in 1998. Adherence to the sanctions also gradually weakened as a number of governments—France, Russia, Germany, and China, among others—angled for oil contracts and other business opportunities with the Iraqis. By 2003, most governments and intelligence services had concluded that Saddam had been successful in resuming his weapons programs. That view was reinforced by his boasting and his behavior, intended to persuade his own people—and his neighbors—of that success. The result was unanimous adoption in the fall of 2002 of UN Security Council Resolution 1441, which demanded a full accounting of progress in Iraq’s weapons programs and a rigorous international inspection effort. Serious consequences were threatened for noncompliance.Saddam nonetheless continued to play games with the inspectors and the international community. As Condi Rice would write years later, “The fact is, we invaded Iraq because we believed we had run out of other options. The sanctions were not working, the inspections were unsatisfactory, and we could not get Saddam to leave by other means.” Particularly later, as the war dragged on, fewer and fewer people accepted that logic.
    T HE I RAQ S TUDY G ROUP
    After I retired as director of central intelligence in January 1993, I had no access to classified information—and didn’t want any. I was happy to leave Washington, D.C., in my rearview mirror, and one of many reasons to move to the Pacific Northwest was to avoid being asked to serve on any of the countless special commissions, blue ribbon panels, or study groups whose work almost invariably ends up collecting dust on some policy maker’s shelf. But I did read a lot of newspapers, and based on what I read—and my