The reports about the Bush administration’s breathtaking lack of preparation for post-Saddam conditions in Iraq keep piling up, but this one is even more disturbing than most.
U.S. intelligence agencies repeatedly warned the White House beginning more than two years ago that the insurgency in Iraq had deep local roots, was likely to worsen and could lead to civil war, according to former senior intelligence officials who helped craft the reports.
Among the warnings, Knight Ridder has learned, was a major study, called a National Intelligence Estimate, completed in October 2003 that concluded that the insurgency was fueled by local conditions — not foreign terrorists — and drew strength from deep grievances, including the presence of U.S. troops.
The existence of the top-secret document, which was the subject of a bitter three-month debate among U.S. intelligence agencies, has not been previously disclosed to a wide public audience.
Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld insisted that the threat posed by the insurgency was manageable. In August 2003, with concerns about the insurgency growing, Bush told reporters, “There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on…. We’ve got the force necessary to deal with the security situation.” Two years later, Cheney famously described the insurgency as being in its “last throes.”
All the while, the U.S. intelligence community was trying to convince policy makers, through “dozens of intelligence reports,” that the exact opposite was true. As per the norm with this administration, those who were right were ignored. The costs of the Bush gang’s misjudgment are almost incalculable.
Robert Hutchings, the chairman of the National Intelligence Council from 2003 to 2005, said the October 2003 study was part of a “steady stream” of dozens of intelligence reports warning Bush and his top lieutenants that the insurgency was intensifying and expanding.
“Frankly, senior officials simply weren’t ready to pay attention to analysis that didn’t conform to their own optimistic scenarios,” Hutchings said in a telephone interview. (emphasis added)
Think about how many times we’ve seen that sentence in different contexts, addressing different Bush screw-ups. It’s painful.