Douglas Jehl and David E. Sanger
New York Times
28 September 2004
Correction Appended
WASHINGTON, Sept. 27 - The same intelligence unit that produced a gloomy report in July about the prospect of growing
instability in Iraq warned the Bush administration about the potential costly consequences of an American-led invasion two
months before the war began, government officials said Monday.
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.
The contents of the two assessments had not been previously disclosed. They were described by the officials after two weeks in
which the White House had tried to minimize the council's latest report, which was prepared this summer and read by senior
officials early this month.
Last week, Mr. Bush dismissed the latest intelligence reports, saying its authors were "just guessing'' about the future, though he
corrected himself later, calling it an "estimate.''
The assessments, meant to address the regional implications and internal challenges that Iraq would face after Mr. Hussein's
ouster, said it was unlikely that Iraq would split apart after an American invasion, the officials said. But they said there was a
significant chance that domestic groups would engage in violent internal conflict with one another unless an occupying force
prevented them from doing so.
Senior White House officials, including Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, have contended that some of the early
predictions provided to the White House by outside experts of what could go wrong in Iraq, including secular strife, have not
come to pass. But President Bush has acknowledged a "miscalculation'' about the virulency of the insurgency that would rise
against the American occupation, though he insisted that it was simply an outgrowth of the speed of the initial military victory in
2003.
The officials outlined the reports after the columnist Robert Novak, in a column published Monday in The Washington Post,
wrote that a senior intelligence official had said at a West Coast gathering last week that the White House had disregarded
warnings from intelligence agencies that a war in Iraq would intensify anti-American hostility in the Muslim world. Mr. Novak
identified the official as Paul R. Pillar, the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, and criticized him for
making remarks that Mr. Novak said were critical of the administration.
The National Intelligence Council is an independent group, made up of outside academics and long-time intelligence
professionals. The C.I.A. describes it as the intelligence community's "center for midterm and long-term strategic thinking.'' Its
main task is to produce National Intelligence Estimates, the most formal reports outlining the consensus of intelligence agencies.
But it also produces less formal assessments, like the ones about Iraq it presented in January 2003.
One of the intelligence documents described the building of democracy in Iraq as a long, difficult and potentially turbulent
process with potential for backsliding into authoritarianism, Iraq's traditional political model, the officials said.
The assessments were described by three government officials who have seen or been briefed on the documents. The officials
spoke on condition that neither they nor their agencies be identified. None of the officials are affiliated in any way with the
campaigns of Mr. Bush or Senator John Kerry. The officials, who were interviewed separately, declined to quote directly from
the documents, but said they were speaking out to present an accurate picture of the prewar warnings.
The officials' descriptions portray assessments that are gloomier than the predictions by some administration officials, most
notably those of Vice President Dick Cheney. But in general, the warnings about anti-American sentiment and instability appear
to have been upheld by events, and their disclosure could prove politically damaging to the White House, which has already had
to contend with the disclosure that the National Intelligence Estimate prepared by the council in July presented a far darker
prognosis for Iraq through the end of 2005 than Mr. Bush has done in his statements.
The reports issued by the intelligence council are of two basic types: those that try to assess intelligence data, like the October
2002 document that assessed the state of Iraq's unconventional weapons programs, and broader predictions about foreign
political developments.
The group's National Intelligence Estimate about Iraqi weapons has now been widely discredited for wildly overestimating the
country's capabilities. Members of the intelligence council have complained that they were pressured to write the document too
quickly and that important qualifiers were buried.
The group's recent National Intelligence Estimate, prepared in July this year, with its gloomy picture of Iraq's future, was
described by White House officials in the past two weeks as an academic document that contained little evidence and little that
was new.
"It was finished in July, and not circulated by the intelligence community until the end of August,'' said one senior administration
official. "That's not exactly what you do with an urgent document.''
Mr. Pillar, who has held his post since October 2000, is highly regarded within the C.I.A. But he has been a polarizing figure
within the administration, particularly within the Defense Department, where senior civilians who were among the most vigorous
champions of a war in Iraq derided him as being too dismissive of the threat posed by Mr. Hussein.
A C.I.A. spokesman said Monday that Mr. Pillar was not available for comment and that his comments at the West Coast
session had been made on the condition that he not be identified. An intelligence official said Mr. Pillar had supervised the
drafting of the document, but the official emphasized that it reflected the views of 15 intelligence agencies, including the Defense
Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the State Department's bureau of Intelligence and Research.
A spokesman for the National Security Council, Sean McCormack, said Monday that "we don't comment on intelligence and
classified reports," and he would not say whether Mr. Bush had read the January 2003 reports. But he said "the president was
fully aware of all the challenges prior to making the decision to go to war, and we addressed these challenges in our policies."
"And we also addressed these challenges in public," he added.
A senior administration official likened Mr. Bush's decision to a patient's decision to have risky surgery, even if doctors warn that
there could be serious side effects. "We couldn't live with the status quo," the official said, "because as a result of the status quo
in the Middle East, we were dying, and we saw the evidence of that on Sept. 11."
Officials who have read the July 2004 National Intelligence Estimate have said that even as a best-case situation, it predicted a
period of tenuous stability for Iraq between now and the end of 2005. The worst of three cases cited in the document was that
developments could lead to civil war, the officials have said. Some Democratic senators have asked that the document be
declassified, but administration officials have called that prospect unlikely.
The White House has also sought to minimize the significance of the estimate, with Mr. Bush saying that intelligence agencies had
laid out "several scenarios that said, life could be lousy, life could be O.K. or life could be better, and they were just guessing as
to what the conditions might be like.'' Mr. Bush later corrected himself, saying that he should have used the word estimate.
Democrats have contrasted the dark tone of the intelligence report with the more upbeat descriptions of Iraq's prospects offered
by the administration. The White House has defended its approach, saying that it is the job of intelligence analysts to identify
challenges, and the job of policy makers to overcome them. But administration officials have also emphasized that the White
House was not given a copy of the document until Aug. 31, only about two weeks before it was made public by The New York
Times.
In an interview on "Fox News Sunday," Secretary of State Colin L. Powell acknowledged that "we have seen an increase in
anti-Americanism in the Muslim world'' since the war began. Mr. Powell also said the insurgency in Iraq was "getting worse'' as
forces opposed to the United States and the new Iraqi leadership remained "determined to disrupt the election'' set for January.
Correction: Sept. 29, 2004, Wednesday
A front-page article yesterday about prewar intelligence assessments on Iraq misidentified the television program on
which Secretary of State Colin L. Powell discussed them on Sunday. It was ABC's ''This Week," not ''Fox News
Sunday," on which he appeared the same day.
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Citation:
Douglas Jehl and David E. Sanger, "Prewar Assessment on Iraq Saw Chance of Strong Divisions", New York Times, 28 September 2004.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/28/politics/28intel.html?pagewanted=print&position=