According to information in the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq, delivered July 7, 2004: “Far from being an imminent threat, Iraq had become little more than a hollow shell. By 1999, the intelligence community viewed Saddam Hussein as a washed-up dictator with a military decaying under the weight of economic sanctions and American military pressure. ‘The body of assessments showed that Iraqi military capabilities had steadily degraded following defeat in the first Gulf War in 1991,’ the report noted. ‘Analysts also believed those capabilities would continue to erode as long as economic sanctions remained in place.’ The report blamed the [intelligence] agencies for failing ‘to clearly characterize changes in Iraq’s threat to regional stability and security, taking account of the fact that its conventional military forces steadily degraded after 1990.’ ”
– James Bamford, A Pretext for War, Page 382