Down the Memory Hole: "Devastating" CIA Report Predicted Civil War in Iraq

[BurtWorm]

last November! It's frightening how accurate it was. Back then 398 US servicemen and women had been killed since the start of the conflict. That number is twice as high now.


http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/11/11/sprj.irq.cia/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1083847,00.html


'We could lose this situation'
· CIA says insurgents now 50,000 strong
· Crisis talks over transfer of power

Julian Borger in Washington and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Thursday November 13, 2003
The Guardian

The White House yesterday drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control.

The report, an "appraisal of situation" commissioned by the CIA director, George Tenet, and written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands.

One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents' strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.

An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger"....

[DulceDecorum]

1. What civil war?

Those people are fighting for their own freedom.
That hardly qualifies as a civil war - unless you count George Washington as an insurgent and Benedict Arnold as Ahmed Chalabi.

[BurtWorm]

2. There is no civil war now, technically speaking.

But what we're calling "insurgents" don't want the Shia to take power and what we're calling the militias don't want the Sunnis to take power, and God knows how the Kurds fit into this. The unrest is not, despite what Bush says, because the "terrorists" or "the enemy" are against freedom. There's a power vacuum and many conflicting sides want to fill it.