Scott Kidder

He had designed the 2002 “Bush doctrine” — the declaration that after 9/11, the United States could no longer take the risk of allowing imminent threats to the country gather — for a world in which technology allowed near-perfect information flow, enabling the president to make accurate, black-and-white calls about whether that threat exists. Instead, in its first application to a real-life conflict, the debate turned into an endless feedback loop, reinforcing faulty assumptions. People talked about how many days would be required to get to Baghdad, not whether the evidence for invasion was good enough, or the possibility that the occupation would go awry.