[2] At the CIA, Pillar served in a variety of positions, including Executive Assistant to Director of Central Intelligence William H. Webster (1989–1991).

At that time, according to Pillar, the intelligence community (IC) judged that Iraq had active programs for development of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

Pillar notes, "I did not receive any [intelligence] requests from a policy-maker on Iraq until about a year into the war ... policymakers decided "My goodness, this shows us how much we might not know."

In the UK, Prime Minister Tony Blair accepted a commission of inquiry's conclusions that intelligence and policy had been improperly commingled in such exercises as the publication of the "dodgy dossier", the British counterpart to the United States' Iraqi WMD white paper".

(According to several congressional aides responsible for safeguarding the classified material, no more than six senators and only a handful of House members got beyond the five-page executive summary.)

As the national intelligence officer for the Middle East, I was in charge of coordinating all of the intelligence community's assessments regarding Iraq; the first request I received from any administration policymaker for any such assessment was not until a year into the war.While there is a CIA "politicization ombudsman", Pillar described the function as informally defined, and primarily listening to internal concern about politicization, and summarizing this for senior CIA officials.

While he believes the intelligence oversight committees should have an important role, "the heightened partisanship that has bedeviled so much other work on Capitol Hill has had an especially inhibiting effect in this area".

[11] The piece asserted that Pillar had a "lousy track record" in assessing the terrorist threat and that he rejected the "war" metaphor for counterterrorism, comparing it instead to "the effort by public health authorities to control communicable diseases".

The editorial also asserted that Pillar commented in a public lecture at Johns Hopkins University that "secular" Baathists in Iraq would never cooperate with fundamentalists like al-Qaeda.

In September 2004, Robert Novak wrote, "I reported on Sept. 27 that Paul R. Pillar, the CIA's national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, told a private dinner on the West Coast of secret, unheeded warnings to Bush about going to war.

Sullivan wrote "Novak wasn't at the dinner, which was conducted under established background rules—the substance of Pillar's remarks could be reported, but not his identity or his audience.

"[13] In an October 2004 op-ed in the Washington Times, John B. Roberts II described Pillar is "a longstanding intellectual opponent of the policy options chosen by President Bush to fight terrorism".

Roberts questioned Pillar's suitability to lead the writing of the NIE on Iraq, accusing him of disclosing, to academics and other nongovernmental personnel with whom the National Intelligence Council speaks, the advice given to President Bush.

[16] In early 2006, he wrote an article for Foreign Affairs criticizing the Bush Administration for cherry picking intelligence to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Ritter criticizes Pillar for not mentioning "the issue of regime change and the role played by the CIA in carrying out covert action at the instruction of the White House (both Democratic and Republican) to remove Saddam Hussein from power.

By failing to give due credence to the impact and influence of the CIA's mission of regime change in Iraq on its analysis of Iraqi WMDs, Mr.

And you have to remember, anything that sees light of day as a published—published in the sense of a classified paper—intelligence assessment goes through usually multiple levels of review, various supervisors, branch chiefs and so on, weighing in, approving or disapproving, remanding, forcing changes.

According to Pillar, "I think the most important reason, besides the overall mind-set that turned out to be erroneous, was the desire to avoid the unpleasantness of putting unwelcome assessments on the desks of policymakers".

[20] The New York Times editorial page defended Pillar, noting that the Bush administration did not even ask the CIA for an assessment of the consequences of invading Iraq until a year after the invasion.

However, the official conclusions of investigations by the CIA, FBI, NSA, State Department, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the independent 9/11 Commission have all confirmed Pillar's view that there was no collaborative relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.

[24] Paul R. Pillar published another book titled: "Negotiating Peace: War Termination as a Bargaining Process" by Princeton University Press in 1983.

This paperback edition includes a new, extensive, and provocative post-9/11 introduction, along with the author's in-depth analyses of current terrorist threats, the status of terrorism in world politics, counterterrorism tools available to the United States, state sponsors of terrorism, and how best to educate the public about terrorist threats and counterterrorism.A review of the book in Foreign Affairs says: "The book's strength is its nuanced sense of how Washington's counterterrorism policy actually works, day in and day out.

Homeland Security policy, such as observing the full range of capabilities of terrorist, as opposed to solely focusing on nuclear, biological or chemical warfare, and interrupting radical islamist operations worldwide, should be noted in the counterterrorism effort.

[27] He described the threat as being generated by three complementary factors: In an article in the March/April 2008 issue of Foreign Affairs, Pillar is critical of two recently published books on purported systemic failures of the intelligence community and the necessity for organizational reform.

[28] In an article in the January/February 2012 issue of Foreign Policy, Pillar similarly cites political leadership, not the intelligence community, for most errors of foresight in policy-making.