Knight Ridder: White House Warned of Civil War in Iraq in 2003

Editor & Publisher | March 1 2006

NEW YORK In an article distributed by Knight Ridder’s Washington bureau late Tuesday, Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay report that U.S. intelligence agencies repeatedly warned the White House, starting in 2003, “that the insurgency in Iraq had deep local roots, was likely to worsen and could lead to civil war, according to former senior intelligence officials who helped craft the reports.”

Among the warnings was a National Intelligence Estimate completed in October 2003 that concluded the insurgency was fueled by local conditions - not foreign terrorists- and drew strength from deep grievances, including the presence of U.S. troops. Its existence had not been previously disclosed to a wide public audience.

“The reports received a cool reception from Bush administration policymakers at the White House and the office of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, according to the former officials, who discussed them publicly for the first time,” Landay and Strobel relate.

“President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld and others continued to describe the insurgency as a containable threat, posed mainly by former supporters of Saddam Hussein, criminals and non-Iraqi terrorists - even as the U.S. intelligence community was warning otherwise.”

Robert Hutchings, the chairman of the National Intelligence Council from 2003 to 2005, told the reporters that the October 2003 study was part of a "steady stream" of dozens of intelligence reports warning Bush and his top lieutenants that the insurgency was intensifying and expanding.

"Frankly, senior officials simply weren't ready to pay attention to analysis that didn't conform to their own optimistic scenarios," Hutchings said in a telephone interview.

The office of Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte declined Tuesday to comment for the article.

The Knight Ridder article recalls Bush telling reporters in 2003: "There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on. ... We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."

As recently as May 2005, Cheney told a television interviewer: "I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency."

Last modified March 1, 2006