Meanwhile, back at the war

WASHINGTON — A nearly completed high-level U.S. intelligence analysis warns that unresolved ethnic and sectarian tensions in Iraq could unleash a new wave of violence, potentially reversing the major security and political gains achieved over the last year.

Meaning we're not going to see any kind of 'victory' anytime soon.

U.S. officials familiar with the new National Intelligence Estimate said they were unsure when the top-secret report would be completed and whether it would be published before the Nov. 4 presidential election.

How very ... odd.

More than a half-dozen officials spoke to McClatchy on condition of anonymity because NIE's, the most authoritative analyses produced by the U.S. intelligence community, are restricted to the president, his senior aides and members of Congress except in rare instances when just the key findings are made public.

Apparently Cheney still has the ability to have people and their families disappeared.

The new NIE, which reflects the consensus of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, has significant implications for Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama, whose differences over the Iraq war are a major issue in the presidential campaign.

The findings seem to cast doubts on McCain's frequent assertions that the United States is "on a path to victory" in Iraq by underscoring the deep uncertainties of the situation despite the 30,000-strong U.S. troop surge for which he was the leading congressional advocate.

I still want a definition of what 'victory' is. To McCain it's apparently defined by not leaving. If we leave, it's defeat, like we were defeated in Vietnam... because we left. If we stay for a thousand years, no one can call it defeat because we haven't left.

What really happened

Was what 99% of the media was not reporting. McClatchy reporters respond to McClellan's book:

Enough self-aggrandizing trumpet-blowing. OK, Scott, What Happened?

Here's what happened, based entirely on our own reporting and publicly available documents:

* The Bush administration was gunning for Iraq within days of the 9/11 attacks, dispatching a former CIA director, on a flight authorized by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, to find evidence for a bizarre theory that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the first World Trade Center attack in 1993. (Note: See also Richard Clarke and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill on this point).

* Bush decided by February 2002, at the latest, that he was going to remove Saddam by hook or by crook. (Yes, we reported that at the time).

* White House officials, led by Dick Cheney, began making the case for war in August 2002, in speeches and reports that not only were wrong, but also went well beyond what the available intelligence said at that time, and contained outright fantasies and falsehoods. Indeed, some of that material was never vetted with the intelligence agencies before it was peddled to the public.

* Dissenters, or even those who voiced worry about where the policy was going, were ignored, excluded or punished. (Note: See Gen. Eric Shinseki, Paul O'Neill, Joseph Wilson and all of the State Department 's Arab specialists and much of its intelligence bureau).

* The Bush administration didn't even want to produce the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs that's justly received so much criticism since. The White House thought it was unneeded. It actually was demanded by Congress and slapped together in a matter of weeks before the congressional votes to authorize war on Iraq.

* The October 2002 NIE was flawed, no doubt. But it contained dissents questioning the extent of Saddam's WMD programs, dissents that were buried in the report. Doubts and dissents were then stripped from the publicly released, unclassified version of the NIE.

* The core of the administration's case for war was not just that Saddam was developing WMDs, but also that, unchecked, he might give them to terrorists to attack the United States. Remember smoking guns and mushroom clouds? Inconveniently, the CIA had determined just the opposite: Saddam would attack the United States only if he concluded a U.S. attack on him was unavoidable. He'd give WMD to Islamist terrorists only "as a last chance to exact revenge."

* The Bush administration relied heavily on an Iraqi exile, Ahmed Chalabi, who had been found to be untrustworthy by the State Department and the CIA. Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress were given millions, and produced "defectors" whose tales of WMD sites and terrorist training were false, fanciful and bogus. But the information was fed directly to senior officials and included in official White House documents.

* The same INC-supplied "intelligence" used in the White House propaganda effort (you got that bit right, Scott) also was fed to dozens of U.S. and foreign news organizations.

* It all culminated in a speech by Secretary of State Colin Powell to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003 making the case against Saddam. Virtually every major allegation Powell made turned out later to be wrong. It would have been even worse had not Powell and his team thrown out even more shaky "intelligence" that Cheney's office repeatedly tried to stuff into the speech.

* The Bush administration tried to link Saddam to al Qaida and, by implication, to the 9/11 attacks. Officials repeatedly pushed the CIA for information on such links, and a separate intel shopwas set up under Defense Under Secretary Douglas Feith to find "proof" of such ties. Neither the CIA nor anyone else ever found anything resembling an operational relationship between Saddam and al Qaida.

* An exhaustive review of Saddam Hussein's regime's own documents, released in March 2008, found no operational relationship between Saddam and al Qaida.

* The Bush administration failed to plan for the rebuilding of postwar Iraq, as we were perhaps the first to report. The White House ignored stacks of intelligence reports, some now available in partially unclassified form, warning before the war about the possibilities for insurgency, ethnic warfare, social chaos and the like.

Read the report for the links and for what real journalism should look like. Thank you, Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay.

Rook of Rook's Rant talks about the savaging of McClellan by both sides.

Spocko of Spocko's Brain also shows sympathy for McClellan's dilemma.

Digby speaks.

Jamison Foser of Media Matters.

Dan Froomkin.

emptywheel.

Glenn Greenwald:

One of the most amazing aspects of this week has been watching network media stars feign shock over the fact that anyone could suggest that they were "deferential, complicit enablers" of the Bush march to war. It's as though they never heard anyone ever suggest such a thing until George Bush's own Press Secretary mocked them for being meek, uncritical disseminators of government propaganda, and now -- they seem to want to convey -- they're just so confused and astonished that anyone could possibly think that about them.

Norman Podhoretz is a boob.

Who still insists that we must bomb Iran. Now. Quickly. Before Bush leaves office. Because Iran may achieve a nuke in 2015. And is thinking about nukes. And talking about them. Which in Podhoretz' mind is a bombing offense:

Iran won't have a nuclear weapon until 2015, according to the spooks. This, of course, Podhoretz takes in his stride. Tearing the (classified) 2005 NIE to shreds, he reminds us again that the spooks are more likely wrong than right, and the US must bomb Iran NOW before it's too late: "[O]nly by relying on the accuracy of the 2005 NIE would Mr Bush be able in all good conscience to pass on to his successor the decision of whether or when to bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities. But that estimate, as he could hardly help knowing from the CIA's not exactly brilliant track record, might easily be too optimistic."

But now it's our turn to say "Hold on!" Norman, may we remind you of your introductory sentence? In case you had forgotten, it says: "Up until a fairly short time ago, scarcely anyone dissented from the assessment offered with 'high confidence' by the National Intelligence Estimate of 2005 that Iran was 'determined to develop nuclear weapons'." Yet now you are telling us that like the 2007 NIE, the 2005 NIE is not worth the paper it's written on? So where exactly do you find the evidence to back your unwavering assertions that Iran is on the brink of developing a nuke? In Vice President Dick Cheney's office? Dang, Norman, it really is time to consider a mental silicone implant.

The funny thing is, to the best of our knowledge (including exhaustive web searches) the actual contents of the classified 2005 NIE remain unknown to anyone outside the intelligence establishment or their masters (and clearly, Podhoretz is not a member of the intelligence community).

It was not until the 2007 NIE findings were released that we discovered that the 2005 NIE allegedly assessed "with high confidence that Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons". The 2007 NIE lays out for us exactly how its findings differ from those of 2005, all neatly tabulated and in your face (see the public version of the NIE here ). How does Podhoretz know what the 2005 assessment (with which "scarcely anyone dissented") said, without getting the information from the 2007 NIE that he has so thoroughly discredited?

Actually, there is only one question arising from this tangled web of NIEs, and it's not whether Iran should or should not be bombed, or whether Podhoretz needs hormone therapy, or why people read garbage like his article. The question is, why did the authors of the 2007 NIE see fit to publicly flaunt the (allegedly) inaccurate and previously unknown findings of the 2005 NIE? Could it have been intended as a message to people like Podhoretz's neo-con dog handlers to butt out this time around?

We think that's quite possible: the 2007 key findings were released to the public hard on the heels of reports that the NIE had been delayed for months because of pressure from Cheney's office to make it more congenial to aggressive military action against Iran (see Spooks refuse to toe Cheney's line on Iran, November 10, 2007).

Um.. Could we just speed up the process and bomb Iran with Norman Podhoretz?

We've been here before

The NIE report hasn't knocked Fox News off the war drums.



Are we going to fall for this the second time around?

Talk about breaking into a sweat

Poor guy. Someone should take away his shovel...

Even though they stopped in 2003?

Dan Froomkin of The Washington Post:

By concluding that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program four years ago, the national intelligence estimate released yesterday undermined a key element of President Bush's foreign policy. It raised questions about whether the president and vice president knowingly misled the public about the danger posed by Iran. And it added to Bush's profound credibility problems with the American people and the international community.

But to hear Bush talk about it at the White House press conference this morning, the new NIE vindicated his beliefs and makes his warnings about Iran more potent.

It was neck-snapping spin even by Bush standards. He intentionally misread the report's central point, failed to acknowledge a huge change in his argument for why Iran is dangerous and exhibited pure bullheaded stubbornness.

[snip]

Yesterday's report came as something as a shock to the general public. Bush and Vice President Cheney have long asserted that Iran was actively seeking nuclear weapons, and Cheney, in particular, had been accelerating what some observers saw as a drumbeat for war. But the nation's 16 intelligence agencies didn't come to their conclusion overnight. In fact, this NIE had been in the works for 18 months, during which some of its authors were reportedly harried by Cheney for not being sufficiently hawkish.

Read the whole thing for excellent links.

Steve Bates of The Yellow Doggerel Democrat points out the obvious: Cheney.

Shelved because Colin Powell refused to come out of retirement?

Or maybe nobody wanted to be made to look the fool like he was...

This week, the administration plans to publicly present evidence of an Iranian role in supplying lethal weaponry to Shiite militias in Iraq. The weapons, including a sophisticated, armor-piercing explosive device, have been used almost exclusively against U.S. forces in Iraq and are considered responsible for numerous military deaths over the past two years. Gates said on Friday that Iran has been conclusively linked to the weapons through serial numbers and other markings on the bombs.

But initial plans to lay out a broad case of Iranian involvement in Iraq were shelved two weeks ago. Sources said policymakers acknowledged that they risked a repeat of the now-discredited weapons of mass destruction charges used to justify the Iraq invasion and wanted to avoid any embellishing. "We're not saying the Iranians pulled the trigger," one administration official said. "They provided the technology."

That expanded presentation would have appeared to contradict a new National Intelligence Estimate concluding that Iran, despite the attacks against U.S. forces, is not a significant factor in the sectarian violence in Baghdad.

But this is the stunner quote: (my bold)

Some senior administration officials still relish the notion of a direct confrontation. One ambassador in Washington said he was taken aback when John Hannah, Vice President Cheney's national security adviser, said during a recent meeting that the administration considers 2007 "the year of Iran" and indicated that a U.S. attack was a real possibility. Hannah declined to be interviewed for this article.

Update: Cernig at NewsHog has two posts discussing the evidence that has finally been released. Discussion about the English numbers on the bomb, whether or not it came from Pakistan not Iran, etc.

Update: Proof that nobody wanted to be Colin Powelled:

Eason Jordan rips anonymous Iran intel presentation.
“Why are US officials hiding behind the cloak of anonymity when presenting the most detailed evidence yet that Iran is supplying weaponry to anti-US forces in Iraq?” IraqSlogger.com’s Eason Jordan asks. “After weeks, if not months, of US official planning to present a damning ‘dossier’ of incriminating evidence against Iran, and after this same US administration presented us with lopsided, erroneous information about the capability and evil intentions of the Saddam Hussein regime, the best the US government can give us today is incendiary evidence presented at a Baghdad news conference by three US officials who refuse to be quoted by name? That’s disgraceful and unacceptable.”

What we activated when we took out Saddam

Making the world a much more dangerous place:

Since coming to power last May, Maliki has failed on security, he has failed on political co-existence, and he has failed on refugees.
This brings into question his leadership - something touched on in the United States' National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq, which was released in part on February 2. The 90-page document, much anticipated in the intelligence community, sheds serious doubt on whether the Iraqi leadership can overcome sectarian violence, even with an additional 21,500 US troops sent in by the US president to help Maliki. One section of the report reads: "Even if violence is diminished, given the current winner-take-all attitude and sectarian animosities infecting the political scene, Iraqi leaders will be hard pressed to achieve sustained reconciliation in the time frame of this Estimate."

The report adds that the violence is made in Iraq, and not exported from Syria and Iran as President George W Bush has been saying since 2003.

The NIE adds that the Iraqi security forces would be "unlikely to survive as a non-sectarian national institution", and said that a good outcome depended on a "stronger Iraqi leadership". "The absence of unifying leaders among the Arab Sunnis or Shi'ites with the capacity to speak for or exert control over their confessional groups limits prospects for reconciliation."

The parts of the NIE that Maliki should read relate to the outcomes. It says that while all is not lost, and some factors could help stabilize Iraq, many destabilizing factors could easily plunge the country into more chaos. The report mentions "sustained mass sectarian killing, assassination of major religious and political leaders and a complete Sunni defection from the government". Any one of these has "the potential to convulse severely Iraq's security environment".

Tragically, any one of these is all too possible in the shambles that Iraq has become.

Listen to Richard Clarke and Keith Olbermann

Talking about the delayed NIE report, and warning us that terrorist are capable and inevitably will bring the fight here to the United States.