https://www.businessinsider.com/george-bush-liar-cia-mohammed-atta-prague-911-iraq-invasion-2023-3
Alice: A lot of that pressure on the agency comes down through the briefers. They come back from their meetings with the president and other senior officials, give feedback. On a contentious issue you might go to a meeting upstairs on the seventh floor, with the briefers, where everybody is in the room. Once, I was writing a PDB [item for the President's Daily Brief] on what going into Iraq would likely do to our terrorism cooperation with allies. The message I got back was, the president doesn't want to hear about this. Iraq was a done deal.
Bob: They were all saying that. I mean, the US was moving our forces over to the Middle East big-time. You're not going to waste all that fuel and transport power and then listen to Saddam. British intelligence realized it first. They essentially said, "My god, these people are going to invade. It doesn't matter what we write. It doesn't matter what their own intelligence analysts tell them about the consequences. They're going to invade."
Alice: I remember just totally blocking this whole thing out of my mind. I was like, "No we can't possibly go into Iraq because that would be the worst thing we could possibly do." And then one day, I realized we were going. It was a done deal. It was a horrible thing. Because we had a real opportunity to deal a death blow to al-Qaeda, or at least get it down to a level where it would be manageable. Instead we blew it up. We created the conditions that led to the rise of ISIS.