Editorial: Damn the intelligence

Monday, June 4, 2007 | 7:07 a.m.

It is hard for us to think of the mounting casualties in Iraq among American troops and Iraqi civilians without also thinking of how President Bush was warned before he ordered the war that it would likely go terribly wrong.

Much has been written over the past three years about how Bush was so narrowly focused on starting a war in Iraq that he used mistaken intelligence - such as the purported existence of huge stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq - to the near exclusion of accurate intelligence.

The latest report bearing out this truth came last month from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The committee released assessments that were written by the National Intelligence Council in January 2003, two months before we invaded Iraq.

The committee, according to reporting by The Washington Post, said the NIC assessments represented the consensus views of the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and other agencies.

Almost everything happening in Iraq today - the rise of al-Qaida's presence, the involvement of Iran, the difficulty of creating a democracy in a country that has only known centuries of authoritarianism, sectarian hostilities - was forecast.

The assessments were circulated to senior members of the Bush administration at the White House, State Department and Defense Department. Yet at the time, as reports in the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post pointed out, the Bush administration continued to publicly insist that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators and that democracy would come quickly and serve as a model for the whole Middle East.

History will not be kind to George W. Bush.