It is clear that the most salient reasons given by the British and U.S. governments for going to war turn out to have been a great deal less than compelling. They seem to have been largely wrong about the scale, danger and battlefield availability of Saddam Hussein's vaunted weapons of mass destruction, albeit wrong in the company of U.S. and British and Israeli (and French and German) Intelligence.

Does this rob the war of legitimacy? Not for any of us reporters who saw Iraqis kiss British tanks in Basra and hail the weary Marines in Baghdad, nor even for those who stayed on to chronicle Saddam's torture chambers and the mass graves that remain the most pungent and enduring monument to the Ozymandias of Baghdad.

There was, in those thrilling moments in April, a mood of liberation in much of Iraq, however much it may have been squandered since, in large part because of the rather endearing fact that Americans, to their credit, do not make natural imperialists. And many of those who initially supported the war, witness several of the current Democratic Presidential candidates, have changed their tune as that first flush of freedom gave way to the grim campaigns against insurgency and to Iraq's complex new ethnic politics of Shiites and Sunni and Kurds.

Could it have been different? Possibly, if the Pentagon's top officials had not been so intent on fighting turf wars in Washington that they point-blank refused to consider the 14 volumes of post-war planning prepared by the State Department's Future of Iraq project. Its key recommendations were that the Iraqi Army (never fully trusted by Saddam Hussein, which is why he depended on the Republican Guard) should not be fully disbanded and the Baathist party should not be indiscriminately purged. Sending home hundreds of thousands of trained troops to unemployment and poverty was unwise, and the reconstruction effort sorely needed the skills of the often-apolitical engineers and teachers and administrators who were required to join the Baathist Party.

But we now know from retired Gen. Jay Garner, the first civilian administrator of Iraq, that Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld told him to ignore the findings of the Iraq Project, and then told him to sack the Project's director, the State Department's Tom Warrick. Garner himself was ousted within a month of victory, to be replaced by L. Paul Bremer, and the Iraqi army was forthwith disbanded and the Baathists purged.

The postwar problem, which persists on several different levels, is that neither the White House nor the Pentagon (the faults of the State Department and the CIA are less clear) seems particularly well informed about Iraq in particular, nor about the Middle East in general.

The ugly truth of the brilliant military victory over Saddam Hussein's reluctant forces is that the U.S. experienced a series of intelligence failures, tactical as well as strategic. The most obvious concerns Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction. The most strategically embarrassing was the misjudgment over the impact of the Turkish election, and the presence of a new and moderately Islamist government, on the Pentagon plan to invade Iraq on two fronts with the 4th Division attacking from the north through Turkey. In the event, the Turkish parliament failed to approve the plan, and the 4th Division missed the war, leaving their comrades in the 3rd Division, the Marines and the paratroops thin on the ground. This mattered less for the war itself than during the immediate post-war security duties, when at times there were fewer than 1,800 exhausted combat troops available to guard and police a demoralized city of 5 million people.

Tactically, the most telling comment on the inadequacy of U.S. Intelligence comes from Maj. Gen James Mattis, commanding the 1st Marine Division, who noted that "T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) had a better idea of the personality and capability of his Turkish adversaries in World War I" than he was ever able to get from U.S. Intelligence concerning the Iraqis. We know from Maj. Gen. David Petraeus of the 101st Airborne that the Iraqi use of the fedayeen against the U.S. supply lines at Nasariyah and Najaf came as a nasty surprise, despite abundant evidence in the Iraqi media that Saddam's son were organizing just such a force. The reluctance of the Shiites of the south to embrace their liberators, until they were convinced they would not be abandoned this time as they were in 1991, was equally unexpected, as was the ability of a relatively small group of Baathist militants to maintain their authority in Basra.

Politically, the reliance on the Iraqi exiles led by Ahmed Chalabi, and the acceptance of their biased advice to purge all known Baathists and dismantle the Iraqi army, has put formidable obstacles in the path of post-war stabilization. The failure (or perhaps refusal) of the Pentagon to make use of the State Department's impressive multi-volume plan for post-war reconstruction was at best ill-informed, but it was just one element in an evident breach of understanding between these two grand institutions of the American state for which the president and his national security adviser, Condoleeza Rice, bear the ultimate responsibility. Throw in the bureaucratic civil war over intelligence between the CIA and the Pentagon and there were times, before and after the war, when the Bush administration appeared seriously and alarmingly dysfunctional. The final intelligence failure was to under-estimate the potential for post-war resistance.

But all this is hindsight, and for a reporter who was there during the fighting, it is important to recall just how intense and uncertain and confused it all was at the time. In my own understandably heated report from the immediacy of the front lines, I confessed that I had "learned to love the military. Time after time, they saved our necks. They put our soft-skinned vehicles behind their armor when the shells came in. They told us when to duck and when it was safe to move. They shared their food and water with us and were embarrassingly grateful when we let them use our satellite phones to call home. We were embarrassed that it was all we could do for them ... forget journalistic objectivity. There were armed men across the road trying to kill me and my protection depended on these troops, many of whom I now knew by their first names. There was no question which side I was on."

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