It just doesn’t seem to end. Last week, the New York Times ran a stunning item about the Bush administration’s mistakes in Iraq allowing an insurgency to take hold and grow stronger over time. Today we learn that the administration was warned about the likelihood of an insurgency just before and after the invasion began, but the alerts were widely ignored.
As the insurgency has intensified, so has the scrutiny of the White House over warnings it received before the war that predicted the instability. An examination of prewar intelligence on the possibility of postwar violence and of the administration’s response shows:
* Military and civilian intelligence agencies repeatedly warned prior to the invasion that Iraqi insurgent forces were preparing to fight and that their ranks would grow as other Iraqis came to resent the U.S. occupation and organize guerrilla attacks.
* The war plan put together by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Army Gen. Tommy Franks discounted these warnings. Rumsfeld and Franks anticipated surrender by Iraqi ground forces and a warm welcome from civilians.
* The insurgency began not after the end of major combat in May 2003 but at the beginning of the war, yet Pentagon officials were slow to identify the enemy and to grasp how serious a threat the guerrilla attacks posed.
Once again, they believed what they wanted to believe — that we’d be “greeted as liberators” — and blew off the “reality-based community.” What administration officials can’t deny, however, is that they were warned about the insurgency in advance. Worse, they have no explanation now as to why they ignored the threat.