Unheeded warnings: Bush knew war in Iraq was a bad idea

According to a recently disclosed report offered up by the Senate Intelligence Committee, everything that has gone wrong in Iraq — insurgency, economic chaos, the rise of Al-Qaeda — was anticipated by the CIA in 2003 and Bush knew it. Bush’s claim that he is a credible messenger because he reads the intelligence once again is shown to be a falsehood. If that where true, then he chose to ignore thorough, well-documented information that could have kept us out of this mess in the first place and saved tens of thousands of lives.

Bush knew two months before he triggered the invasion of Iraq that his actions would create what he now calls “America’s greatest threat,” that being Al-Qaeda in Iraq. The report also warned that an invasion would spur, rather than deter, other WMD programs in other countries. It raised the likelihood of drawn out factional violence in Iraq, that a war would increase global support for radical Islamic terrorists and militant Islamic groups seeking political power, that it would lead Al-Qaeda to accelerate anti-U.S. operations, and that it would not only help Al-Qaeda recover in Afganistan but go so far as to create new Al-Qaeda allies around the world — including in Iraq.

The report continues with a litany of additional warnings: That Iran would achieve greater influence in the middle east, and that “States with developmental WMD programs would try to increase the secrecy and pace of those programs with the hope of developing deterrent capabilities before they could be pre-empted.” (From the January 2003 NIC report).

Finally, despite Bush’s continued insistence that Iraq would become an engine for Democracy, the report concludes that in fact Iraq would likely not be a catalyst for regional change by itself, and that any progress “would depend heavily on U.S. success in ensuring that a new Iraqi government was not seen in the region as primarily a U.S. creation.” (January 2003 NIC Report).

So what happened? How could Bush and his administration ignore a report represented as an assessment of the _entire intelligence community_? Clearly, he expected this to be a cake walk and charged ahead regardless of a great deal of information warning that the war would be unwise. His agenda to establish control in the region, against all rational evidence, took precedence over the well being of this nation and thousands of lives.

Do we really have to live with this man calling the shots for another year and a half?