And so I worked on it some more for a while, but it was very frustrating and it seemed like that, surely that would galvanise things and it caused lots of activity, but not lots of progress. And then we ended up having the second Gulf War, which was exactly the scenario that I had been using as an example, although it was Iraq instead of Iran. But it turns out my curveball was just exactly what I said could happen and what people knew would happen. And somehow all that work, and I... everything I had done failed to have any effect on that, and we went and fought what I think was a very unnecessary war, by fooling ourselves. And I think we genuinely did fool ourselves, thinking that he had chemical weapons. But you can go back and look at the errors in logic that we had, but at the time, I think everybody in the intelligence community really believed it because of the bad ways that we put together information, interpreted information.

So that all... you know, that felt like a personal failure to me. I felt bad about that, that I put an awful lot of effort into that and in the end it led to nothing helpful. So that got me kind of discouraged about working on that stuff. So I got less and less enthusiastic about the government work. And then the thing that really pushed it over is when the George W Bush administration came in. The tone of everything changed a bit. Because I had been doing this, like, since the Reagan administration, gone through Democrat and Republican. Generally the science advisors who were really trying to help were left out of the politics, as it should be, but when George W Bush came along, we started getting asked questions like, 'Have you donated any money to the other party?' 'Have you...' People who were like Baptist preachers started getting onto scientific committees and it just felt bad to me, so I pulled away from it.