Iraq: Descending Into Chaos

[PatrickHenry]

Anybody catch this story? http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story...368899,00.html

The Bush administration's robust assertions that the situation in Iraq would improve with next month's elections were badly shaken yesterday with the leak of a gloomy end-of-tour cable from the departing CIA station chief in Baghdad. The bleak assessment, reported in yesterday's New York Times, warned that Iraq would descend even deeper into violent chaos unless the government was able to assert its authority and deliver concrete economic improvements. <snip> The classified assessment was sent to CIA headquarters in Virginia late last month as the officer ended a year-long tour in Iraq. It was bolstered by a similar assessment from a second CIA officer, Michael Kostiw, who serves as a senior adviser to the agency chief, Porter Goss. The outlook offered by the station chief echoes several similar warnings from officials in Washington and Baghdad. An intelligence estimate prepared for the White House last August said that Iraq's security situation could remain tenuous at best until the end of 2005, and warned the country was at risk of civil war. But the latest warning is particularly ill-timed for the White House, which has been focused on assuring Americans that the situation in Iraq would improve with the coming elections. It is also a personal embarrassment for Mr Goss, a former Republican congressman who had made it his mission to stem the flow of embarrassing leaks from the agency.

Negroponte and Bush deny this take on the situation, but the CIA source was a station chief and had access to a great deal of intelligence.

As station chief, the unnamed CIA official supervised more than 300 operatives, the largest intelligence operation since the Vietnam war, and their assessment carries authority. While the senior US military commander in Iraq, General George Casey Jr, initially raised no objections to the CIA assessment, the New York Times reported that the US ambassador, John Negroponte, had filed a lengthy message of dissent in which he argued that the US had made considerable progress in controlling the insurgency.

[saif]

Excellent thread...

[kharmajunkie]

"The Bush administration's robust assertions that the situation in Iraq would improve with next month's elections were badly shaken yesterday with the leak of a gloomy end-of-tour cable from the departing CIA station chief in Baghdad"


And of course the Administration will spin this as another guy on his way out the door with a case of sour grapes. That's become the standard drill against anyone talking straight about problems over there.

[Scribbler1]

How can so many people still support the war, is what boggles my mind. I realize they are Bush supporters and therefore apologists but do any of them realize you can STILL support the President and think the war was a colossal blunder?

[Osborn F Enready]

WAIT, these CIA guys making these statements are TOTAL LEFTISTS! How can anyone believe what they say, since they are just mad that Kerry didn't win........... oh wait......

I hadn't seen a post like that yet, so I thought I would add that in there in advance.....(parody)

Great post Pat, eventually the public is going to have to face the ugly truth that we ARE NOT being told by official sources such as the White House Press corps.

Saif said: Excellent thread...

I say: I agree.

Kharmajunkie said: And of course the Administration will spin this as another guy on his way out the door with a case of sour grapes. That's become the standard drill against anyone talking straight about problems over there.

I say: I couldn't agree more.

Scribbler said: How can so many people still support the war, is what boggles my mind. I realize they are Bush supporters and therefore apologists but do any of them realize you can STILL support the President and think the war was a colossal blunder?

I say: Scrib, I don't think most of them do because they base it on the "with us, or against us" mentality that Bush was so get at advocating. He is trying to make it "them" (the establishment and their loyalists) against the world.

[bishop]

Negroponte and Bush deny this take on the situation, but the CIA source was a station chief and had access to a great deal of intelligence.

incidences like this will now worsen thanks to the new "intelligence" bill that just passed.. now, administrations can legally pad handpicked bureaucrats/politicians into a purportedly legitimate intelligence body.. so, when the cia issues reports like that, the politicized intelligence body can refute it - and at the end of the day it will become even more apparent that politics and hidden agendas are what fuel our wars, not the need to defend the country from foreign attack.


i can't say that the situation will be better/worse in iraq over the next few months.. although the fact that even hezbollah workers are being targetted certainly isn't a remotely positive sign. the reality is that the situation will also be bad if elections are postponed. there really isn't a winnable situation from our perspective - ala quagmire. nation building is a damn difficult, and often unsuccessful, venture - there's a good reason why we've avoided such policies for so many years.. leave it up to the stupidest president in modern history to change that.

[Osborn F Enready]

Bishop said: nation building is a damn difficult, and often unsuccessful, venture - there's a good reason why we've avoided such policies for so many years.. leave it up to the stupidest president in modern history to change that.

I say: Thats no joke, and gosh, didn't GeeDub himself say "No New Nation Building"? Yet another lie to add to the (oooohhhhh so long) list of his lies to date.

[bishop]

shhh... you were supposed to have forgotten that by now.

[Dieval]

Wait, isn't this the CIA that was wrong about the WMD's in Iraq?

[bishop]

the cia had it wrong as well as the dia/dod.. douglas feith wasn't employed by the cia.. the cia also didn't say that the post-war situation would be stable - in fact they said that the situation would increase the threat of terrorism.

the cia was never an advocate for invasion.. because of politics, it also wasn't ever against the invasion.. but that's fine, the institution is supposed to analyze the responses to policies and strategize their affects, not set the policy itself - that's the state department's job. but in the days leading up to the invasion, the cia sure seemed to be championing the call for containment rather than nation building.

http://www.cato.org/dailys/10-14-02.html

[RickSp]

The CIA station's chief assessment only adds to the obvious.

The US cannot provide security to virtually any part of Iraq. Even the "Green Zone" comes under regular mortar fire. The ten mile road between Baghdad and the airport is constantly under attack. Insurgents move freely in the Sunni Triangle while newly trained Iraqi National Guardsmen and police are being slaughtered in ever increasing numbers. And every day one one, two or five American soldiers die while another ten or twenty are seriously wounded.

And all the while the Bush Administration paints a delusional picture of "freedom and democracy on the march." I doubt even Dubya believes the lies anymore.

[Sonart]

Quote by: Dieval Wait, isn't this the CIA that was wrong about the WMD's in Iraq?

No, this is the CIA that was ignored by the administration in favor the Pentagon OSP and their favorite Iranian spy, Ahmed Chalabi.

New Yorker, Seymour Hersch
TIME, Michael Duffy
Newsweek, Evan Thomas, Richard Wolffe and Michael Isikoff

It's also the CIA that was ignored in the Jan. 2003 National Intelligence Council report to the administration that warned of an impending insurgency should we occupy Iraq.

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[rmnunez]

Sonart, don't evade the question. How can we put much faith in the CIA which accurately (to some) assessed the likelyhood of an insurgency or the absence of terrorist ties in Iraq, when its the same crew who said there was an active WMD procurement effort there too.

[Sonart]

Quote by: rmnunez Sonart, don't evade the question. How can we put much faith in the CIA which accurately (to some) assessed the likelyhood of an insurgency or the absence of terrorist ties in Iraq, when its the same crew who said there was an active WMD procurement effort there too.

I'm not evading your question, rm, I answered it and now you are evading that answer. The CIA was NOT saying there was an active WMD procurement effort... they were quite ambiguous about it, which is why Dear Leader and his NeoCon Pentagon went around them, and I presented, had you bothered to read them, multiple, legitimate sources that described how and why it was done.

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New Yorker --"The Administration eventually got its way, a former C.I.A. official said. “The analysts at the C.I.A. were beaten down defending their assessments. And they blame George Tenet”—the C.I.A. director—“for not protecting them. I’ve never seen a government like this."--

--"Chalabi’s defector reports were now flowing from the Pentagon directly to the Vice-President’s office, and then on to the President, with little prior evaluation by intelligence professionals. When INR (State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research) analysts did get a look at the reports, they were troubled by what they found. “They’d pick apart a report and find out that the source had been wrong before, or had no access to the information provided,” Greg Thielmann told me. “There was considerable skepticism throughout the intelligence community about the reliability of Chalabi’s sources, but the defector reports were coming all the time. Knock one down and another comes along. Meanwhile, the garbage was being shoved straight to the President."--

TIME --"Unlike his father, who ran the CIA briefly in the mid-'70s and prided himself on revitalizing an embattled spy corps, George W. Bush dotted his foreign-policy team with people who have waged a private war with the CIA for years, men who are disdainful of the way the agency gathers secrets — and what it makes of them. Working mainly out of the Pentagon, the hard-liners have long believed that America's spy agency was a complacent captive of the two parties' internationalist wings, too wary and risk averse, too reliant on gadgets and too slow to see enemies poised to strike.

The hard-liners' staunch beliefs were powerfully bolstered after 9/11; they quickly concluded that the CIA failed to anticipate the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. And they were not reassured by the CIA's performance after 9/11 either. By last fall, Rumsfeld had grown so impatient with the CIA's equivocal explanations of the Iraq problem that he set up his own mini-CIA at the Pentagon called the Office of Special Plans. It was hatched and designed, as a former U.S. official puts it, to get "the intelligence he wanted."--

Newsweek -- --"Then came the defectors. Former Iraqi officials fleeing the regime told of underground bunkers and labs hiding vast stores of chemical and biological weapons and nuclear materials. The CIA, at first, was skeptical. Defectors in search of safe haven sometimes stretch or invent the facts. The true believers in the Bush administration, on the other hand, embraced the defectors and credited their stories. Many of the defectors were sent to the Americans by Ahmed Chalabi, the politically ambitious and controversial Iraqi exile. Chalabi’s chief patron is Richard Perle, the former Reagan Defense Department official and charter member of the so-called neocons, the hard-liners who occupy many top jobs in the Bush national-security establishment.

The CIA was especially wary of Chalabi, whom they regarded as a con man (Chalabi has been convicted of bank fraud in Jordan; he denies the charges). But rather than accept the CIA’s doubts, top officials in the Bush Defense Department set up their own team of intelligence analysts, a small but powerful shop now called the Office of Special Plans—and, half-jokingly, by its members, “the Cabal.”?--

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Quote by: rmnunez How can we put much faith in the CIA which accurately (to some) assessed the likelyhood of an insurgency...

Do you seriously deny that the CIA got it right and that the administration got it dead wrong? Or that they were right to have had serious questions about the evidence of whether or not Iraq had active WMD?


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[rmnunez]

It seems to me the CIA got it right if they accurately estimated the resistance and wrong if they inaccurately estimated WMDs in Iraq. This should mean the CIA sometimes is more accurate than other times. You and I are no more accurate than the CIA, sometimes we will make a good estimate and other times we won't. We are told the CIA's outgoing station chief in Baghdad has made an accurate assessment as it relates to the insurgency, if it is accurate I don't think it will be so just because the CIA produced it.

[Scribbler1]

Quote by: rmnunez It seems to me the CIA got it right if they accurately estimated the resistance and wrong if they inaccurately estimated WMDs in Iraq. This should mean the CIA sometimes is more accurate than other times. You and I are no more accurate than the CIA, sometimes we will make a good estimate and other times we won't. We are told the CIA's outgoing station chief in Baghdad has made an accurate assessment as it relates to the insurgency, if it is accurate I don't think it will be so just because the CIA produced it.

The difference is that the CIA's JOB is to be right and we put them there in a position of trust to make sure a president has the best info possible. If as you say, they were right about the insurgency but wrong about WMD's (which actually is incorrect and has been debunked here already), then tell me why, in your opinion, Bush ignored the CIA warnings about resistance in Iraq?

[Sonart]

Quote by: rmnunez It seems to me the CIA got it right if they accurately estimated the resistance and wrong if they inaccurately estimated WMDs in Iraq.

Look, rm, I've tried to make it as clear as possible that the administration ignored CIA intel because it wasn't what they wanted to see, and that they chose instead to do their own analysis in Rumsfeld's Pentagon OSP and funnel it straight to the White House.

Yet you simply ignore the information I've posted and just repeat, "well, if the CIA got it wrong on WMD..."

Could you at least do me the courtesy of reviewing the information I've posted and, if you disagree with it, commenting, rather than just forging ahead with an assumption that I've tried to demonstrate is false?


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[RickSp]

Quote by: Sonart Yet you simply ignore the information I've posted and just repeat, "well, if the CIA got it wrong on WMD..." .

What I find doubly amusing is that in other threads rmnunez was still quibbling over whether the WMD might yet exist, perhaps smuggled off to another country or hidden by the Easter Bunny. Now he appears to be conceding that the WMD threat did not exist.

More likely he is simply opposing anything that might be contrary to the War Party line. Consistency be damned. Loyalty above all.

[bishop]

you guys should report posts like that.. they only serve to drag down the quality of debate.

[OberonDOtherseid]

I guess that would mean no one would be left posting here, Bishop. Don't even try to say there are no conspiracy theorists in your camp posting chicken little fantasies 99% of the time.