The CIA-Pentagon war divide is John Kiriakou’s name for the standing three-versus-three lineup he has watched in successive American war debates: the CIA, the State Department, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the cautious side, and the office of the vice president, the office of the secretary of defense, and the National Security Council on the pro-war side.
First hearing (May 2002)
Kiriakou dates his first encounter with the framing to his first day as executive assistant to the CIA’s deputy director for operations, in May 2002. He arrived “very excited” and asked what they were going to do. The DDO said he could not answer until Kiriakou had gone to security and signed the paperwork, “they were waiting for me and they made me sign six separate secrecy agreements.”[1][2][3]
The briefing Kiriakou then received named the war and the reason. “Next year we’re going to attack Iraq. We’re going to overthrow Saddam Hussein and we’re going to open the world’s largest air force base in southern Iraq so that we can move all of our air force bases out of Saudi Arabia and stop Osama bin Laden from saying that we’re polluting the land of the two holy mosques.” Kiriakou’s answer was that the U.S. had not yet caught bin Laden; the reply was that “the decision has already been made and the battle lines have been drawn.”[3][4]
Those lines, as Kiriakou has since repeated them: “The pro-war forces are the office of the vice president, the office of the secretary of defense, and the National Security Council. And the anti-war forces are the CIA, the State Department, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Those are the three organisations in government that understand what it takes to fight a war and that understand that most wars are not winnable over the long term.”[4]
The Iran replay (2026)
Twenty-four years later, on the Iran question, Kiriakou says the lineup held. “Now we’re 24 years later and those battle lines are exactly the same”, the CIA and the Joint Chiefs warning that regime change was unpopular and unrealistic, and Benjamin Netanyahu convincing the president that “as soon as the first rocket was fired, the Iranian government would collapse like a house of cards and everybody would live happily ever after.”[5][6]
Kiriakou’s summary of the outcome is that the war “weakened the United States” and “strengthened the Iranian government” by forcing internal Iranian factions to unite: “the United States and especially the United States and Israel could never be seen as liberators. They could only be seen as attackers and occupiers.”[7][8]