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Add intelligence (please)

By Phil Barron ⋅ December 7, 2004 ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ Post a comment

Yet another example of Bush’s Iraq policy running into unpleasant facts: having completed his tour of duty, the CIA station chief for Iraq prepared a candid assessment of the situation there. In a nutshell, things are bleak with scant prospects of improvement soon. As expected, Bush administration officials rushed to downplay the bad stuff relayed by this professional observer.

Such life in George Bush’s Fantasia.

A classified cable sent by the CIA’s station chief in Baghdad has warned that the situation in Iraq is deteriorating and may not rebound any time soon, according to government officials.

The cable, sent late last month as the officer ended a yearlong tour of duty, presented a bleak assessment on matters of politics, economics and security, the officials said. They said its basic conclusions had been echoed in recent briefings to top government officials by a senior CIA officer who recently returned Iraq.

The officials described the two assessments as having been “mixed,” saying that they did describe Iraq as having made important progress, particularly in terms of its political process, and credited Iraqis with being resilient.

Yet overall, the officials described the station chief’s cable in particular as an unvarnished assessment of the difficulties ahead in Iraq. They said it warned that the security situation was likely to get worse, bringing more violence and sectarian clashes, unless there were marked improvements soon in the ability of the Iraqi government to assert authority and build the economy.

Together, the appraisals, which follow several other such warnings from officials in Washington and in the field, were much more pessimistic than the public picture being offered by the Bush administration before the elections scheduled for Iraq Jan. 30, the officials said. [...]

The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte, was said by the officials to have filed a written dissent, objecting to one finding as too harsh, on the ground that the United States had made more progress than was described in fighting the Iraqi insurgency. But the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey Jr., also reviewed the cable and did not dispute its conclusions, the officials said.

Juan Cole’s rejoinder to Negroponte’s panglossian critique:

Uh, John, when you have conquered a country and ruled it for 18 months, and when you have 140,000 plus troops on the ground, and when you have to forbid your embassy staff to take the 10-mile-long road from the capital to the airport because their lives cannot be assured on it– then, John, things are deteriorating and may not get better soon. Get used to it.

Fantasia.

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