So says USA Today:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-10-24-insurgence-intel_x.htm
- 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.
In their public statements before the war, Bush administration officials did not disclose the existence of the intelligence warnings. Iraqis, they said, would be grateful to be rid of Saddam.
Speaking to a Veterans of Foreign Wars conference two weeks before the invasion, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said of Iraqis, "Like the people of France in the 1940s, they view us as their hoped-for liberator." Vice President Cheney had voiced the same theme a week earlier, saying on NBC's Meet the Press that "we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators."
Even after it became clear that Iraqi insurgents were capable of sustained conflict, administration officials downplayed the seriousness of the situation.
The violence, Rumsfeld said, was the work of foreign fighters and "pockets of (Iraqi) dead-enders." During the war, Franks described the violence as terrorism, not an insurgency.
But the administration tacitly acknowledged its error early in the weeks following the war when it scrapped plans that would have reduced the U.S. force in Iraq to as few as 30,000 troops and issued orders that have since kept the U.S. force at more than 130,000 troops.