It's coming out. The Bush Administration was warned, repeatedly, months before the event, about the consequences of a badly planned Iraq invasion, with no meaningful strategy to "win the peace." It wasn't that they had NO plan, but that it was a BAD plan with no chance of succeeding.
AP reports that analysts in the intelligence community widely circulated what is by and large a deadly accurate estimate of the consequences of the Iraq invasion.
***UPDATE***H/T to Topdog08 for this: The Senate Intelligence Committee, released this PDF report with the details. Hagel and Snowe actually voted with the majority. Think Snowe is starting to hear the wolves howling in the distance?
(Made the rec list. Big thanks to everyone. Let's keep shining the light. And keep fighting. Don't let the appropriations defeat keep you from staying with us!)
_ Establishing a stable democracy in Iraq would be a long, steep and probably turbulent challenge. They said that contributions could be made from 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.
_ Domestic 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."
None of which was heeded by the White House - no funding ever made its way to those who needed it to stabilize the country. Rumsfeld, Jay Garner and L. Paul Bremer ramrodded an ideologically-based system through which effectively, accomplished nothing except to allow the insurgency to gain its footing.
Meanwhile, four Republican senators — Bond, John Warner of Virginia, Orrin Hatch of Utah and Richard Burr of North Carolina — wrote that the report exaggerates the importance of the pre-invasion assessments. They said the reports weren't based on intelligence information, but instead were speculation from experts in and out of government.
"They were no more authoritative than the many other educated opinions that were available in the same timeframe," the Republicans wrote.
Yeah, unfortunately, unlike YOU a$$holes, they happened to be right. In almost every particular. And YOUR PRESIDENT was warned. Your reckless, ignorant pissant of a President.
Can we impeach these guys now? (Yeah, right. Don't bother answering that.)
These Senators take the cake for mendacity.
Remind me again why we're kowtowing to these people and giving them their war funding? WHAT DOES IT FREAKIN TAKE to say NO to these people?
As a final note, I cannot recommend more highly the following two books:
Cobra II
Chasing Ghosts
Both of which I've just finished. The two books magnificently and coincidentally complement one another in having the broad-picture view of the Iraq boondoggle, and the micro view from the Iraqi street in the other.
With this report appearing, it's more fuel for the fire, despite the fact that Rockefeller released it on a FRIDAY.
***UPDATE 2*** With every small piece of evidence that appears, it becomes even more clear that Rumsfeld and Bush's intention was to create a new Kleptocracy in Iraq. A Kleptocracy to replace the old one. It's so abundantly obvious that they never intended to do anything to help the Iraqi people. Rieckhoff, in Chasing Ghosts, puts it well:
...In his first four years as President, George W. Bush had sent my beautiful and revered country careening over a cliff like a drunken sixteen-year-old behind the wheel of a Ferrari. America had rushed into war based on faulty intelligence. Iraq was a mess, and getting worse every day. Diplomacy had been abandoned, and most of the world hated us. Our military was being run into the ground. Bush exaggerated our progress. He admitted no mistakes. He offered no new intiatives to deal with Iraq. America was not safer.
This country's reputation is in tatters. It will take generations for us to wash off this stain.
***UPDATE 3*** Some have understandably commented that this is not really news. After all, we already knew all this. True, but now it's codified from a previously classified CIA report revealed by the Senate Intelligence Committee... So yes, we all knew it, but it was never officially acknowledged ANYWHERE in the manistream. This is significant because a) responsible people in the CIA were attempting all along to warn the Bushies that this would be a disaster; b) thus George Tenet is even more to blame for downplaying this kind of information when stepping up to the plate would really have counted for something, and was most clearly stabbing his own people in the back; c) brutally confirms that Bush and his people were cherry-picking intel that fit their agenda; d) makes publicly clear with unimpeachable evidence what all of knew - that Bush and his crowd had all the information they needed to make a decision.
It was not incompetence. Everything was structured in a most deliberate fashion.