By KATHERINE SHRADER, Associated Press Writer
Wednesday May 23, 2007
WASHINGTON - U.S. intelligence agencies warned senior members
of the Bush administration in early 2003 that invading Iraq
could create instability that would give Iran and al-Qaida
new opportunities to expand their influence, according to an
upcoming Senate report.
Officials familiar with the Senate Intelligence Committee
investigation also say analysts warned against a sustained
U.S. presence, which could increase extremist recruiting. The
officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the report's
declassification is not finished. It could be made public as
soon as this week.
The committee also found that the warnings predicting what
would happen after the U.S. led invasion were circulated widely
in government, including to the Pentagon and the Office of
the Vice President. It wasn't clear whether President Bush
was briefed.
The report comes as the administration is facing renewed criticism
for failing to execute adequate post-invasion plans to stabilize
Iraq after Saddam Hussein was toppled. Meanwhile, the White
House has been trying to make the case that Iraq cannot be
abandoned.
The committee's findings are the latest chapter in its four-year
investigation into the prewar intelligence assessments on Iraq.
An earlier volume, completed and released in 2004, was highly
critical of the intelligence community and then CIA Director
George Tenet.
That 511-page document found widespread problems throughout
U.S. spy agencies and said the intelligence community engaged
in "group think" by failing to challenge the assumption
that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Senators also found
that analysts failed to explain their uncertainties to policymakers.
Yet, in predicting the effects of the U.S. invasion, the committee
now finds that U.S. analysts appear to have largely been on
the mark.
A former intelligence official, who spoke on condition of
anonymity, said the decision to go to war had been made months
before the 2003 papers were drafted and analysts had no delusions
that they were going to head off military action. Rather, the
official said, they hoped their warnings would be considered
in the planning.
Since the release of his memoir several weeks ago, Tenet has
been criticized anew for not doing more to warn Bush about
the shaky Iraq intelligence and the consequences of invading.
Yet his book provided a glimpse of some of the prewar warnings
about the consequences of invading Iraq.
For instance, he discusses a paper prepared for a Camp David
meeting with the president in September 2002 entitled, "The
Perfect Storm: The Negative Consequences for Invading Iraq." Tenet
called the paper a list of "worst-case scenarios," which
included anarchy and territorial breakup of Iraq and a surge
of global terrorism against U.S. interests, fueled by deepening
Islamic antipathy toward the United States.
He also notes that, in an early 2003 intelligence paper, analysts
warned that "a post-Saddam authority would face a deeply
divided society with a significant chance that domestic groups
would engage in violent conflict with each other, unless an
occupying force prevented them from doing so."
The paper, which is believed to figure in the Senate investigation,
also noted that Iraq's long history of foreign occupation means
that it has a deep dislike of occupying forces.
Since 2003, the Senate committee led by Sen. Pat Roberts,
R-Kan., and now Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va. has been trudging
through its investigation of what went wrong, frequently slowed
by politics.
Last fall, the committee released new chapters on what was
learned after the invasion about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction
and its links to terrorism and how information from an advocacy
group, the Iraqi National Congress, crept into U.S. intelligence
reporting.
While the first phase of its report was supported unanimously
just before the 2004 presidential elections, the newer findings
on the intelligence community's predictions about postwar Iraq
have drawn dissent from Republicans. Details on the committee's
vote have not yet been released.
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