This wasn’t a military-versus-civilian flaw, or a Democrat-versus-Republican error. It went deeper. At the top, then as now, there was an aura of omniscience. The assessments of the intelligence community, our diplomats, and our military had been excluded from the decision-making circle. After the fact, some political leaders called it an intelligence failure; that was scapegoating, because we had been warned that an Al Qaeda–aligned terror group would come again. That assessment was ignored. It’s frustrating to listen to any leader blame his predecessor, especially a political leader
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