Political Forecast

Hopefully this will be the first of many more posts, now that I have began to get acclimated to college life and dealing with the workload.

Tomorrow’s New York Times (or today’s, depending on when you reading this) is printing a story about reports from the National Intelligence Committee on prewar Iraq intelligence that foresaw the strong divisions that have now emerged.

“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.”

This seems like it would be deeply damaging to any Bush Administration claim that the Iraq war was justified and that a sufficient strategy was formulated for actions after Saddam Hussein’s regime was removed.

The reports went on to say, according to the Times:

“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.”

This is pretty much the current situation that exists in Iraq, particularly the issue of an insurgent force. The only thing that seems to be glaringly false, at least now because of new intelligence, is the assertion or hypothesis that existing terrorist groups would wage guerilla warfare. It is insane to think that there were strong existing terrorist cells in Iraq because of the despot they operated under desired such a strong control over the people of Iraq. Saddam would not have allowed any group, whether they supported him or not, to act independently as a quasi-military force because they could pose a threat to his regime and control over the nation.

Overall, this just seems to further corroborate what has been said in most democratic circles already: Bush knew the risks going into Iraq and the inconclusiveness of the intelligence, yet still decided to do it. Whether it was based on avenging what happened during his father’s administration, as Times columnist Maureen Dowd says; or their moralist and “God told me to do it” approach, now the American public can become more aware of the problems inherent within this administration at so many different levels. Just a few more reasons to vote Kerry/Edwards on November 2nd.

EDIT: A link to the story can be found here (membership required).