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Bush ignored intelligence

A review by former intelligence officers has concluded that the Bush administration "apparently paid little or no attention" to prewar assessments by the CIA that warned of major cultural and political obstacles to stability in postwar Iraq.

The unclassified report was completed in July last year. It appeared publicly for the first time this week in the quarterly journal Studies in Intelligence, and was first reported Wednesday in USA Today. The journal is published by the Center for the Study of Intelligence, which is part of the CIA but operates independently.

The review was conducted by a team led by Richard Kerr, a former deputy CIA director, working under contract for the CIA. It acknowledged the deep failures in the agency's prewar assessments of Iraq's weapons programs but said "the analysis was right" on cultural and political issues related to postwar Iraq.

Kerr's review did not describe those findings in detail. But the New York Times first reported last year that two classified reports prepared for President George W. Bush in January 2003 had predicted that an US-led invasion of Iraq would increase support for political Islam and would result in a deeply divided Iraqi society prone to violent internal conflict.

Those reports were by the National Intelligence Council, the high-level group that is responsible for the production of the government's most authoritative intelligence assessments.

Since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the CIA and other intelligence agencies have been notably more gloomy than the White House and the Pentagon about prospects for stability in Iraq.

The role played by prewar intelligence on postwar Iraq has not yet been the subject of a comprehensive independent review.

The issue was to have been addressed by the Senate Intelligence Committee as part of a second phase of its inquiry that began with a study of the intelligence on Iraq's weapons. But the Republican-led committee has shown no sign of a report, prompting complaints from Senator Jay Rockefeller and other Democrats.

A White House spokesman, Frederick Jones, disputed any suggestion that the administration had fallen short in its postwar planning.

"Our position is that we did plan adequately for the postwar period," Jones said.

The CIA declined to comment, and Kerr did not respond to an e-mail message.

A former senior intelligence official said Kerr's conclusions were "broadly correct." Still, the former official said, "that some in the policymaking world would probably deny that points were brought to their attention."

The review was one of three conducted by Kerr and his team, but it is the only one that was unclassified. It described as "seriously flawed, misleading and even wrong" most of the conclusions reached by the CIA prior to the invasion of Iraq.
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