OnePeople

Much ink has been spilled over the Small Group of Men who hijacked a history-honed Conservative (yes, capital C) philosophy of peace-by-overwhelming-strength and reluctant engagement (see: Foreign Policy Successes, Cold War) in favor of overly-optimistic open-ended intervention (see: LBJ, Nightmares of).

And much blood has been spilled over this SGM's lack of planning for post-war Iraq--- a result of an assumption that the Iraqis would, more or less, like being occupied by our benevolent angels of democracy. It's been safe to assume, up to this point, that the President and his SGM had insulated themselves from contrary views, hence a strategy based a view of the world with as much depth as a one-page briefing summary, which we know is all this President reads. (Remember folks, he's not dumb, he's just intellectually lazy).

But today, Douglas Jehl and David Sanger report in the NY Times that the National Intelligence Council (the same people who brought you the "things will stay the same or get worse" study first reported on last month) gave the President an analysis in January '03 that stated, as Jehl and Sanger's summarize:

"... 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."

You may remember that Bush, when asked about the most recent (stay-same-or-get-worse) report, said that the authors were "just guessing" about the future.

Pretty good guesses. 2 for 2. The exisitence of this report shows that they were not just insulated from contrary views, rather they were willfully ignorant of them. So just what did they think was going to happen? And what were they basing it on?

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