The Negative Power of Presidential Wishful Thinking on Iraq

Rand Beers' final White House assignment after working for four presidents was to fig ure out whether attacking Iraq would leave the back door open to another al-Qaida strike on the homeland.

"But as we worked through that problem," said Beers, then a counterterrorism adviser to President Bush, "it became clear to me that by the form of our entry into Iraq we were also diminishing our ability to operate more broadly in the world."

By early 2003, the coalition of the willing already had become much less willing.