September 28, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL and DAVID E. SANGER
New York Times
The same intelligence unit that
produced a gloomy report in July about the prospect of
growing instability in Iraq warned the Bush
administration about the potential costly consequences of an
American-led invasion two months before the war began,
government officials said Monday.
The estimate came in two classified reports prepared for
President Bush in January 2003 by the National Intelligence
Council, an independent group that advises the director of
central intelligence. The assessments predicted that an
American-led invasion of Iraq would increase support for
political Islam and would result in a deeply divided Iraqi
society prone to violent internal conflict.
One of the reports also warned of a possible insurgency
against the new Iraqi government or American-led forces,
saying that rogue elements from Saddam Hussein's
government could work with existing terrorist groups or act
independently to wage guerrilla warfare, the officials said.
The assessments also said a war would increase sympathy
across the Islamic world for some terrorist objectives, at
least in the short run, the officials said.
The contents of the two assessments had not been
previously disclosed. They were described by the
officials after two weeks in which the White House had tried
to minimize the council's latest report, which was prepared
this summer and read by senior officials early this month.
Last week, Mr. Bush dismissed the latest intelligence
reports, saying its authors were "just guessing'' about
the future, though he corrected himself later, calling it an
"estimate.''
The assessments, meant to address the regional
implications
and internal challenges that Iraq would face after Mr.
Hussein's ouster, said it was unlikely that Iraq would split
apart after an American invasion, the officials said. But
they said there was a significant chance that domestic
groups would engage in violent internal conflict with one
another unless an occupying force prevented them from doing
so.
Senior White House officials, including Condoleezza Rice,
the national security adviser, have contended that some
of
the early predictions provided to the White House by
outside experts of what could go wrong in Iraq, including
secular strife, have not come to pass. But President Bush
has acknowledged a "miscalculation'' about the virulency of
the insurgency that would rise against the American
occupation, though he insisted that it was simply an
outgrowth of the speed of the initial military victory in
2003.
The officials outlined the reports after the columnist
Robert Novak, in a column published Monday in The
Washington Post, wrote that a senior intelligence
official
had said at a West Coast gathering last week that the
White House had disregarded warnings from intelligence
agencies that a war in Iraq would intensify anti-American
hostility in the Muslim world. Mr. Novak identified the
official as Paul R. Pillar, the national intelligence
officer for the Near East and South Asia, and criticized him
for making remarks that Mr. Novak said were critical of the
administration.
The National Intelligence Council is an independent
group,
made up of outside academics and long-time intelligence
professionals. The C.I.A. describes it as the intelligence
community's "center for midterm and long-term strategic
thinking.'' Its main task is to produce National
Intelligence Estimates, the most formal reports outlining
the consensus of intelligence agencies. But it also produces
less formal assessments, like the ones about Iraq it
presented in January 2003.
One of the intelligence documents described the building
of democracy in Iraq as a long, difficult and potentially
turbulent process with potential for backsliding into
authoritarianism, Iraq's traditional political model, the
officials said.
The assessments were described by three government
officials who have seen or been briefed on the documents.
The officials spoke on condition that neither they nor
their agencies be identified. None of the officials are
affiliated in any way with the campaigns of Mr. Bush or
Senator John Kerry. The officials, who were interviewed
separately, declined to quote directly from the documents,
but said they were speaking out to present an accurate
picture of the prewar warnings.
The officials' descriptions portray assessments that are
gloomier than the predictions by some administration
officials, most notably those of Vice President Dick Cheney.
But in general, the warnings about anti-American sentiment
and instability appear to have been upheld by events, and
their disclosure could prove politically damaging to the
White House, which has already had to contend with the
disclosure that the National Intelligence Estimate prepared
by the council in July presented a far darker prognosis for
Iraq through the end of 2005 than Mr. Bush has done in his
statements.
The reports issued by the intelligence council are of two
basic types: those that try to assess intelligence data,
like the October 2002 document that assessed the state of
Iraq's unconventional weapons programs, and broader
predictions about foreign political developments.
The group's National Intelligence Estimate about Iraqi
weapons has now been widely discredited for wildly
overestimating the country's capabilities. Members of the
intelligence council have complained that they were
pressured to write the document too quickly and that
important qualifiers were buried.
The group's recent National Intelligence Estimate,
prepared
in July this year, with its gloomy picture of Iraq's
future, was described by White House officials in the
past
two weeks as an academic document that contained little
evidence and little that was new.
"It was finished in July, and not circulated by the
intelligence community until the end of August,'' said one
senior administration official. "That's not exactly what you
do with an urgent document.''
Mr. Pillar, who has held his post since October 2000, is
highly regarded within the C.I.A. But he has been a
polarizing figure within the administration, particularly
within the Defense Department, where senior civilians who
were among the most vigorous champions of a war in Iraq
derided him as being too dismissive of the threat posed by
Mr. Hussein.
A C.I.A. spokesman said Monday that Mr. Pillar was not
available for comment and that his comments at the West
Coast session had been made on the condition that he not be
identified. An intelligence official said Mr. Pillar had
supervised the drafting of the document, but the official
emphasized that it reflected the views of 15 intelligence
agencies, including the Defense Intelligence Agency, the
National Security Agency, and the State Department's bureau
of Intelligence and Research.
A spokesman for the National Security Council, Sean
McCormack, said Monday that "we don't comment on
intelligence and classified reports," and he would not say
whether Mr. Bush had read the January 2003 reports. But he
said "the president was fully aware of all the challenges
prior to making the decision to go to war, and we addressed
these challenges in our policies." "And we also addressed
these challenges in public," he added. A senior
administration official likened Mr. Bush's decision to a
patient's decision to have risky surgery, even if doctors
warn that there could be serious side effects. "We couldn't
live with the status quo," the official said, "because as a
result of the status quo in the Middle East, we were dying,
and we saw the evidence of that on Sept. 11."
Officials who have read the July 2004 National
Intelligence Estimate have said that even as a best-case
situation, it predicted a period of tenuous stability for
Iraq between now and the end of 2005. The worst of three
cases cited in the document was that developments could lead
to civil war, the officials have said. Some Democratic
senators have asked that the document be declassified, but
administration officials have called that prospect unlikely.
The White House has also sought to minimize the significance
of the estimate, with Mr. Bush saying that intelligence
agencies had laid out "several scenarios that said, life
could be lousy, life could be O.K. or life could be better,
and they were just guessing as to what the conditions might
be like.'' Mr. Bush later corrected himself, saying that he
should have used the word estimate.
Democrats have contrasted the dark tone of the
intelligence report with the more upbeat descriptions of
Iraq's prospects offered by the administration. The White
House has defended its approach, saying that it is the job
of intelligence analysts to identify challenges, and the job
of policy makers to overcome them. But administration
officials have also emphasized that the White House was not
given a copy of the document until Aug. 31, only about two
weeks before it was made public by The New York Times.
In an interview on "Fox News Sunday," Secretary of State
Colin L. Powell acknowledged that "we have seen an increase
in anti-Americanism in the Muslim world'' since the war
began. Mr. Powell also said the insurgency in Iraq was
"getting worse'' as forces opposed to the United States and
the new Iraqi leadership remained "determined to disrupt the
election'' set for January.
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