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October 25, 2004
You Believe Your Intelligence; I'll Believe Mine
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.
So they could find all kinds of "intelligence" to prove that Iraq was just bursting at the seams with WMDs, but intelligence that showed U.S. troops wouldn't be greeted as liberators somehow got overlooked. The former, of course, proved false, while the latter proved true. Yessirree, I can see why these folks deserve another term in the White House.
(Link courtesy Antiwar.com.)
Posted by Mike Tennant at October 25, 2004 10:58 AM