Over the weekend, David Ignatius wrote a love letter to the CIA praising the agency for its prescient analysis of the problems this country would face in Iraq. Ignatius writes:
The estimates were circulated in January 2003. You don’t have to take my word or Pillar’s for what they said: They are posted on the Web site of the Senate intelligence committee. They make haunting reading now, to put it mildly — because nearly every setback we have seen in Iraq was forecast by Pillar and the analysts in their effort to break through the administration’s happy talk. The opening paragraph of the estimate on “Principal Challenges in Post-Saddam Iraq” made this stark prediction: “The building of an Iraqi democracy would be a long, difficult and probably turbulent process, with potential for backsliding into Iraq’s tradition of authoritarianism.” The next paragraph warned more explicitly that “a post-Saddam authority would face a deeply divided society with a significant chance that domestic groups would engage in violent conflict.” The second estimate, on “Regional Consequences of Regime Change in Iraq,” rightly warned that an invasion could spawn more Muslim terrorism, rather than less. Here’s how Pillar and the analysts summarized the danger on the first page: “A U.S.-led war against and occupation of Iraq would boost political Islam and increase popular sympathy for some terrorist objectives, at least in the short term.”
Gary Schmitt dissected these estimates in THE WEEKLY STANDARD this summer. How about that backsliding?
Certainly, it is true that establishing democracy in Iraq will take time. That said, it actually hasn’t been the case that Iraqis have spurned democracy. Given how beaten down civil society and politics were by the Baathist regime, and how extreme the security problems facing Iraqis since Saddam’s removal have been, the democratic process has been surprisingly resilient. There has been little or no “backsliding into Iraq’s tradition of authoritarianism,” as the NIC suggested might happen.
And Iraq’s deeply divided society…
Finally, the headline news from the report was the supposed prediction by the intelligence community that sectarian violence would erupt in the wake of a U.S. invasion, Shiites would engage in bloody reprisals against Sunnis, and the dead-enders from Saddam’s regime would turn to guerrilla war. Yet, as the NIC analysis also notes, this “violent conflict” between Iraqi groups would occur “unless an occupying force prevented them from doing so.” In short, the sectarian killings we have seen over the past year were not inevitable. To the contrary, until the al Qaeda attack on the Shia mosque in Samara in early 2006, it was quite striking how little Shias struck back at the Iraqi Sunni community. And contrary to the potential bloody “score-settling” predicted by the NIC in the wake of Saddam’s fall, the Shia, under the leadership of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, kept sectarian violence to a minimum.
There’s a lot more in Schmitt’s piece, but the bottom line is that the two NIEs that prompt Ignatius to gush about the CIA’s foresight are, in fact, almost entirely worthless. On the upside, Ignatius’s sources at the CIA must have been very pleased with his effort to rehabilitate the agency’s reputation.
