Newsweek’s latest issue provides another good reason not to re-elect the president, unless you think Iraq was a great success:
Deep in the Pentagon, admirals and generals are updating plans for possible U.S. military action in Syria and Iran. The Defense Department unit responsible for military planning for the two troublesome countries is "busier than ever," an administration official says. Some Bush advisers characterize the work as merely an effort to revise routine plans the Pentagon maintains for all contingencies in light of the Iraq war. More skittish bureaucrats say the updates are accompanied by a revived campaign by administration conservatives and neocons for more hard-line U.S. policies toward the countries. (Syria is regarded as a major route for jihadis entering Iraq, and Iran appears to be actively pursuing nuclear weapons.) Even hard-liners acknowledge that given the U.S. military commitment in Iraq, a U.S. attack on either country would be an unlikely last resort; covert action of some kind is the favored route for Washington hard-liners who want regime change in Damascus and Tehran.
Meanwhile, I continue to wonder why there isn’t more leaking happening during the pre-election struggle about Bush’s bungling of Iraq. It might be starting. Paul Pillar, the CIA’s Middle East officer at the National Intelligence Council, seems to be doing his part. According to Bob Novak’s latest column, Pillar is telling people that the CIA provided “secret, unheeded warnings about going to war in Iraq,” and the “the president of the United States and the Central Intelligence Agency are at war with each other.”
The New York Times, meanwhile, carries some more details about Pillar’s views, in a useful, if sketchy leak about the CIA’s 2003 estimates about what a war with Iraq would mean. (The estimates came from Pillar’s unit.) The CIA told Bush that it would be a mess, and specifically that invading Iraq would lead to an increase in the power of “political Islam.” It reports :
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.
But the 2003 estimates are just the tip of giant iceberg. My point is, virtually the entire U.S. national security bureaucracy thought that going to war in Iraq was wrong, even crazy. Right now there ought to be a flood of leaks saying, “I told you so.” Where are they?
