In his latest book, The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century, Tim Weiner attempts to answer this question by focusing on the period when the agency’s chronic self-deception hardened into something almost metaphysical.
Weiner has made something of a career chronicling the national security state in its long, unbroken slide from hubris to hallucination.
Legacy of Ashes, his Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the CIA, traced the agency’s postwar record with the cool patience of a mortician who explains, “No, your uncle did not pass away peacefully. He died a horrible death from self-inflicted injuries due to sheer arrogance.”
The Mission continues that cautionary tale, showing how the CIA metamorphosed from an institution that merely misunderstood the world into one that began to fabricate its own reality.
This isn’t your typical story of lies told for geopolitical advantage.
Weiner is interested in something stranger: the way an entire political and bureaucratic class became trapped inside a narrative of its own design.
Readers of The Mission will learn how the neoconservatives during George W. Bush’s presidency built a discursive maze and then promptly blocked every exit route.
Saddam Hussein was the minotaur in the middle. He was the source of all evil, the mastermind of every threat, the explanatory key to every puzzle, including the puzzles no one had bothered to pose.
After accepting the premise that Saddam was the omnipotent puppeteer of global terror, the intelligence world became a self-licking ice cream cone. Every scrap of information, no matter how malformed or contradictory, is reshaped to confirm the structure of belief already in place.
Weiner reports this with an almost forensic calm, but the effect is startling. You feel the claustrophobia of a government performing an elaborate ritual of knowledge production while willfully ignoring the world beyond its security perimeter.
The CIA, conceived as the sober-minded counterweight to political enthusiasm, instead became the chief manufacturer of the hallucination it was supposed to dissect.
Analysts knew the evidence for WMDs was weak. Soldiers on the ground doubted the magical properties attributed to Zarqawi. Diplomats warned that Iraq was a mosaic, not a monolith. But once the myth caught the imagination of the White House, it began to transubstantiate into fact. And rational restraint—caution, scepticism, bureaucratic foot-dragging—turned into treachery.
Reading Weiner’s reconstruction of the post-9/11 years, you begin to perceive how the current hyperreality of the populist right—the conspiracy theorising, the baroque fantasies of deep-state machination, the fevered need for a heroic strongman—gestated in the long shadow of the War on Terror.
It was George W. Bush’s administration that collapsed the distinction between intelligence and propaganda, between prudence and cowardice, between leadership and theatrical masculinity. The political imagination we now call “post-truth” was incubated not on Facebook but in the Situation Room.
Weiner, to his credit, never succumbs to the temptation to make this a morality tale. The bureaucrats, contractors, and political operatives he writes about are not comic book villains. Rather, they are Americans doing what Americans in power have so often done, confusing the projection of force with the comprehension of reality.
But the banality of this colossal intelligence failure only makes it more disturbing. US intelligence officers in Iraq are pressured to produce battlefield assessments that match Washington’s ideological expectations. Internal dissent is muted, lest it embarrass the president. The complexity of the Middle East is replaced with a storyboard of good and evil that could have been ripped from the pages of a Tom Clancy novel.
Parts of this narrative will be depressingly familiar to anyone who was paying attention during the early 2000s. But Weiner manages to summon the vertigo of that moment with fresh clarity.
Readers of The Mission will grasp how the United States entered a new emotional atmosphere in which prudence felt like betrayal and questions were a sign of weakness. The American public was invited to inhabit a state of permanent menace. To be sceptical of this logic was to be naïve. And to be naïve was to be unpatriotic.
In Weiner’s recounting, this internalisation of myth within the national-security bureaucracy was not simply a political project but a psychological one.
The American intelligence community had entered the twenty-first century with a wounded ego. The Cold War victory had falsely promised that the supremacy of the United States was the natural condition of the world. But the terrorist attack on 11 September 2001 delivered a humiliating contradiction.
Within this framework, the temptation to restore the nation’s lost omnipotence through a display of overwhelming force was irresistible. And so the CIA, which had long been haunted by its own half-achievements, aligned itself with a White House desperate to reassert mastery.
This is where The Mission becomes more than a historical account. Weiner constructs a detailed genealogy of the political pathologies that now shape American life.
Neoconservatives spoke of national security and the promotion of democracy worldwide. Yet the affective structure of their worldview—the longing for a decisive sovereign, the intolerance of ambiguity, the lure of simple explanations for complex events—laid the groundwork for the populist authoritarianism that would erupt a decade later.
The post-9/11 insistence that the White House must wield unfettered power for the sake of national salvation mutated, with grim predictability, into the current argument that any challenge to presidential authority is a conspiracy.
The Mission shows how the War on Terror was not merely a foreign-policy disaster, but the crucible in which a generation learned that emotional certainty was more persuasive than empirical accuracy. For people seduced by this way of thinking, national humiliation could be redeemed only through a performance of toughness.
Neoconservatives promoted the 2003 invasion of Iraq as an act of decisive will, an expression of American vitality. The fact that it rested on faulty premises did not embarrass its architects so much as harden their commitment to the fantasy. The more the war faltered, the more it needed to be justified by new layers of myth. Victory was always just around the corner, provided you believed hard enough.
Weiner underscores the ironies in his tale.
The CIA, forced into a posture of aggressive optimism, spent the next two decades generating intelligence that vacillated between half-truth and wish fulfilment. The United States, straining to display dominance, revealed the limits of its power with theatrical clarity.
The architects of the War on Terror, certain they could remake the Middle East, ended up destabilising it in ways they scarcely understood.
The political class that demanded unquestioning obedience ultimately undermined the very credibility it claimed to defend. And through it all, the public absorbed the lesson that official narratives were both omnipresent and unreliable, a vacuum into which conspiratorial thinking would soon rush.
This is The Mission’s most important lesson for today. Americans now live in an epistemic landscape in which belief is a form of identity, dissent is a performative gesture, and truth is whatever flatters a person’s sense of grievance.
That landscape did not materialise out of nowhere. It was cultivated. The administration of George W. Bush trained the public to think in terms of existential threats and heroic solutions, to accept the idea that the nation’s most important decisions were made behind closed doors by people who knew better than you, and to treat doubt as sabotage.
Under these circumstances, the boundary between justified suspicion and unhinged paranoia was bound to erode.
The very techniques that the War on Terror normalised in foreign policy—narrative simplification, scapegoating, projection, the moralisation of fear—are easily repurposed for domestic use. And so the same country that once saw hidden terror cells in every mosque began to see hidden traitors in the office of every elected official, from the White House to town councils.
The same emotional appeal to unity through force that justified invasion abroad now justifies executive impunity at home. The same disdain for nuance that silenced Middle East experts now silences epidemiologists, environmental scientists, even local school boards.
Seen in this light, the authoritarian instincts of today’s populist right look less like an aberration than a delayed revelation. It is the War on Terror turned inward.
Although Tim Weiner doesn’t entirely spell this continuity out in The Mission, his reporting makes it almost impossible to ignore. The dysfunctions he discerns in the twenty-first-century CIA mirror the dysfunctions of a broader political culture that has come to treat reality as a constraint. And while the book is a story of institutional failure, it also indicts a society that prefers melodrama to facts.
By the time Weiner reaches the Biden years, the agency is a bruised institution, chastened but not fundamentally reformed. The ghosts of 2003 linger in every briefing, every interagency debate, every calculation about how much the public can stomach. But the deeper legacy is not the ruin of Iraq or the evaporation of American prestige. It is the transformation of the political imagination itself.
In the end, The Mission communicates a sense of tragic circularity.
The United States entered the twenty-first century determined to reassert its sovereignty through force and certainty. Yet in trying to achieve this goal, it eroded the very foundations of democratic legitimacy.
A nation taught to fear shadows abroad became enthralled by shadows at home. A political system that demanded obedient trust in times of crisis now finds itself unable to command trust at all. And a populace marinated for two decades in tales of clandestine threats has become convinced that its own government is the ultimate conspirator.
This is the most unsettling implication of Weiner’s work.
The War on Terror did not merely reshape the geopolitical order. It reshaped the American psyche. It habituated a generation to the idea that truth is provisional, that power can dictate fact, that scepticism is subversion, and that safety depends on believing in the right enemies.
We live in the afterglow of a two-decade-long experiment in state-sponsored hyperreality, and the results are everywhere: in the paranoid style of online discourse, in the cult of the strongman, in the corrosive mistrust that now greets every official statement.
This is why The Mission lands with surprising force. The War on Terror was not simply a geopolitical misadventure; it was a cultural event that altered how Americans think about truth, authority, and dissent. Its language, its imagery, its emotional temperature all helped prepare the ground for a politics in which belief is a weapon and reality an inconvenience.
By zeroing in on the CIA’s institutional failures, Tim Weiner does a great job of explaining how the United States went wrong.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
