I think this article is agreeing with you. It's saying that it's not an "intelligence" failure in the traditional "military intelligence" sense of the word we expect, but rather it's an "intelligence" failure in "runaway idiocy" sense.

then they should have called it a "mental faculties" failure.

this is an attempt to make it look like the CIA or NSA fucked up, when we know damn well they knew Iran had been prepping to fight the US for decades.

this is a Presidential failure, or more likely, a Presidential Advisor failure. and "failure" in the sense that Stephen Miller or Steve Bannon have been pushing for this since day 1.

there is a reason no president ever decided to take a go at them until now, and we're seeing why

Read the last line of the article again.

burying a statement in the last line is disingenuous CYA at best and explicit disinformation at worse.

they could have put it in the headline, or first paragraph.

There's an interview somewhere on YT with a retired general, a really sharp guy, where he points out that the Pentagon has been wargaming this for thirty years and it always had exactly the same outcome, which is the one we're seeing now. The generals knew exactly what would happen. Problem is that there's a dementia patient and some of the most incompetent people ever to hold office running the show, not not educated, thinking people.

Feigned idiocy. The moves we're making in Iran today have been in the works for decades.

Maybe? Israel has wanted us to go to war in Iran since Reagan. They finally got a president stupid enough (or with sufficient leverage over) to do it. But I wouldn't say from the US's side that this has been in the works for decades.

I don't think it's idiocy. It's self interest of his and his cronies.

Unless that self-interest involves "wanting to watch the world burn" as we trigger an almost fully unprecedented oil and commodity crisis that tanks the economy way worse than 2008 ever was, I'd say Hanlon's razor fully applies here.

Watch their personal portfolios. Of course not an easy thing to do.

If this will stop, it will do so because of the threat to Kushner's investments in the ME.

To use a slight inaccurate historical cliche -- do you think Nero gave two hoots about whether Rome burned or not.

when you already have all of the money you can buy up the market once the crash happens.

that's the goal of Project 2025. Put billionaires in power by owning everything.

That's exactly what it is; and it's worse than negligence for the Atlantic to pretend not to understand this*.

The phenomenon of the Epstein class explicitly calling wars and coups and crashes "full of opportunity" gets virtually zero analysis in Epstein-class owned media, and it's past time that people connect those two dots.

* Did I sign in to the Atlantic to confirm that they pretended not to understand this? No. But I would be shocked to be wrong.

this is a bot

When campaign contributors tell policymakers to jump, they ask, how high? Our policymakers are completely captured by a shadow government of individuals who are at odds with the interests of Americans. Occasionally their interests will coincidentally align with the people's interests, but the link is not intentional, because they don't serve the people any more than necessary to get elected, at which point, they serve the shadow government

The irony is that the current administration ran on a platform of dismantling the shadow government.

It is not really irony, more like projection.

They give themselves away because they expect their adversaries to act like they would.

Indeed the irony is strong