In a move sure to raise even more questions about the decision to go to war with Iraq, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will on Friday release selected portions of pre-war intelligence in which the CIA warned the administration of the risk and consequences of a conflict in the Middle East.
Among other things, the 40-page Senate report reveals that two intelligence assessments before the war accurately predicted that toppling Saddam could lead to a dangerous period of internal violence and provide a boost to terrorists. But those warnings were seemingly ignored.
In January 2003, two months before the invasion, the intelligence community's think tank — the National Intelligence Council — issued an assessment warning that after Saddam was toppled, there was “a significant chance that domestic groups would engage in violent conflict with each other and that rogue Saddam loyalists would wage guerilla warfare either by themselves or in alliance with terrorists.”
Do you understand what this means? The CIA got it right on the intelligence assessment of what would happen after the U.S. toppled Saddam's regime. The CIA predicted that the U.S. invasion of Iraq would result in the fracturing of Iraq between the three ethnic groups, the domestic violence and civil war currently taking place there, and the influx of al Qaeda terrorists to set up shop inside Iraq. And it gets worst here. Continuing with the MSNBC story:
It also warned that “many angry young recruits” would fuel the rank of Islamic extremists and "Iraqi political culture is so embued with mores (opposed) to the democratic experience … that it may resist the most rigorous and prolonged democratic tutorials."
None of those warnings were reflected in the administration's predictions about the war.
In fact, Vice President Cheney stated the day before the war, “Now, I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.”
A second assessment weeks before the invasion warned that the war also could be “exploited by terrorists and extremists outside Iraq.”
The same assessment added, “Iraqi patience with an extended U.S. presence after an overwhelming victory would be short,” and said “humanitarian conditions in many parts of Iraq would probably not understand that the Coalition wartime logistic pipeline would require time to reorient its mission to humanitarian aid.”
Both assessments were given to the White House and to congressional intelligence committees.
And according to the Former CIA Director George Tenet’s new book, “At the Center of the Storm,” the reports to be released Friday were not the only ones out there.
One of Tenet’s clearest arguments regarding the administration's dismissal of all but the rosiest assessments of post-war Iraq comes in his description of a White House meeting in September 2002. There, a briefing book on the Iraq war was laid out for policy makers.
“Near the back of the book, Tab 'P', was a paper the CIA analysts had prepared three weeks earlier,” Tenet writes. “Dated August 13, 2002, it was titled, ‘The Perfect Storm: Planning for the Negative Consequences of Invading Iraq.’ It provided worse case scenarios:
“The United States will face negative consequences with Iraq, the region and beyond which would include:
* Anarchy and the territorial breakup of Iraq;
* Region-threatening instability in key Arab states;
* A surge of global terrorism against US interests fueled by (militant) Islamism;
* Major oil supply disruptions and severe strains in the Atlantic Alliance.”
“These should have been very sobering reports,” says Michael O’Hanlon, military analyst at the Brookings Institution. “The administration should have taken them very serious in preparing plans for a difficult post-Saddam period. And yet the administration did not do so.”
What is even more amazing here is that the Bush administration knew of these CIA reports, and ignored them. Tenet writes in his book that there was the September 2002 meeting on the Iraq invasion, where a briefing book was used which included a CIA policy paper spelling out the worst-case scenarios on the invasion. While I have not read Tenet's book, I can probably guess that the top Bush officials attended the meeting--including Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld, National Security Advisor Condi Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Tenet, and the president. I would love to know if Cheney attended that meeting, and if he even read the CIA's worst-case scenarios paper. Because if that is the case, then Cheney totally lied to the American people when he stated “Now, I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.” Because he knew it could have gotten even worst, as these CIA assessments have shown. Even more damaging, the Bush administration not only ignored these assessments, but they buried them in order to keep this information away from the American public. Instead of presenting these assessments for the American public to consider, the Bush administration decided to concentrate on falsified CIA intelligence reports showing Saddam in possession of non-existent nuclear weapons, with hyped-up fear-mongering of smoking guns becoming mushroom clouds in New York.
The incompetence, the callousness, and criminality of this administration is just incredible.
Update: I found this Associated Press story through Americablog. It is pretty much the same as the MSNBC story, but with a few more interesting details regarding the conclusions that the analysts found:
- Establishing a stable democracy in Iraq would be a long, steep and probably turbulent challenge. They said that contributions could be made by 4 million Iraqi exiles and Iraq's impoverished, underemployed middle class. But they noted that opposition parties would need sustained economic, political and military support.
- Al-Qaida would see the invasion as a chance to accelerate its attacks, and the lines between al-Qaida and other terrorist groups "could become blurred." In a weak spot in the analysis, one paper said that the risk of terror attacks would spike after the invasion and slow over the next three to five years. However, the State Department recently found that attacks last year alone rose sharply.
- Groups in Iraq's deeply divided society would become violent, unless stopped by the occupying force. "Score settling would occur throughout Iraq between those associated with Saddam's regime and those who have suffered most under it," one report stated.
- Iraq's neighbors would jockey for influence and Iranian leaders would try to shape the post-Saddam era to demonstrate Tehran's importance in the region. The less Tehran felt threatened by U.S. actions, the analysts said, "the better the chance that they could cooperate in the postwar period."
- Postwar Iraq would face significant economic challenges, having few resources beyond oil. Analysts predicted that Iraq's large petroleum resources would make economic reconstruction easier, but they didn't anticipate that continued fighting and sabotage would drag down oil production.
- Military action to eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction would not cause other governments in the region to give up such programs.
In addition, you can find the full intelligence report here.
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