{"id":3104,"date":"2009-03-16T15:20:34","date_gmt":"2009-03-16T19:20:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=3104"},"modified":"2011-05-31T12:38:34","modified_gmt":"2011-05-31T16:38:34","slug":"alumnus-discusses-search-for-truth-about-u-s-iraq-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2009\/03\/alumnus-discusses-search-for-truth-about-u-s-iraq-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Alumnus Discusses Search for Truth About U.S.-Iraq War"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"<p>Alumnus<\/a>
Alumnus Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group, speaks about the war in Iraq. Photo by Frank Dahlmeyer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When Charles Duelfer (\u201974 MA, history) was sent to Iraq in 2004 by President George W. Bush to find out why the administration had been wrong about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, he was assured by his old friend George Tenet, CIA director, that they wanted \u201cjust the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Duelfer responded, \u201cHow deep do you want to go?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s always another explanation,\u201d the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences alumnus told faculty and students at the Storrs campus during a talk he gave as part of his national book tour.<\/p>\n

Duelfer\u2019s new book, Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq<\/em>, examines how Iraq and the U.S. twice misled each other into war.<\/p>\n

Both sides understood information only in light of hypotheses that fit their own assumptions, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe thought Saddam Hussein would be crazy not to have weapons of mass destruction,\u201d he said. \u201cSaddam missed the import of 9-11.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said that critical thinking might have raised the questions: \u201cWhat are your assumptions? What are Saddam\u2019s? Can you see something that you don\u2019t have a word for?\u201d<\/p>\n

Duelfer, an intelligence officer and former deputy chairman of UNSCOM, the UN Special Commission on weapons inspection in Iraq after the first Gulf War, said his mission in 2004 was not to find weapons of mass destruction but to find the truth.<\/p>\n

He also wanted to learn how Saddam Hussein \u2013 whom he had debriefed after he was captured \u2013 and his regime had operated.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was an opportunity to record things that would not exist again.\u201d And that, he says, is where his background as a student of history was helpful.<\/p>\n

The report of his Iraq Survey Group in the fall of 2004, often called the Duelfer Report, was described by the Washington Post<\/em> as contradicting nearly every pre-war assertion made by top Bush administration officials about Iraq.<\/p>\n

The administration\u2019s most costly mistake was not that it was wrong about weapons of mass destruction, but that it elected not to take advantage of the CIA\u2019s understanding and judgment about Iraq in its post-Saddam planning, Duelfer said.<\/p>\n

CIA involvement was blocked, and decisions to fire Iraqi Army officers and treat Ba\u2019ath party members as \u201cthe enemy\u201d caused huge problems, he said.<\/p>\n

Today, \u201cwe\u2019re in a fairly decent place\u201d in Iraq, he said. \u201cBut we could have been there four years ago. We paid a huge price.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Charles Duelfer (\u201974 MA, history) was sent to Iraq in 2004 by President George W. Bush to find out why the administration had been wrong about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, he was assured by his old friend George Tenet, CIA director, that they wanted \u201cjust the truth.\u201d But Duelfer responded, \u201cHow deep do […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[38],"class_list":["post-3104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-12 11:52:06","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3104"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36751,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3104\/revisions\/36751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3104"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=3104"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=3104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}