Hagel-"It's beyond pitiful, it's beyond embarrassing,..." [View All]

[faithfulcitizen]

"Intel Officials Have Bleak View for Iraq"

snippet:

The estimate appears to differ from the public comments of Bush and his senior aides who speak more optimistically about the prospects for a peaceful and free Iraq. "We're making progress on the ground," Bush said at his Texas ranch late last month.

A CIA spokesman declined to comment Wednesday night.

The document was first reported by The New York Times on its Web site Wednesday night.

It is the first formal assessment of Iraq since the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on the threat posed by fallen Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

A scathing review of that estimate released this summer by the Senate Intelligence Committee found widespread intelligence failures that led to faulty assumptions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Disclosure of the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq came the same day that Senate Republicans and Democrats denounced the Bush administration's slow progress in rebuilding Iraq, saying the risks of failure are great if it doesn't act with greater urgency.

"It's beyond pitiful, it's beyond embarrassing, it's now in the zone of dangerous," said Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., referring to figures showing only about 6 percent of the reconstruction money approved by Congress last year has been spent.

another snippet:

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said circumstances in Iraq have changed since last year. "It's important that you have some flexibility."

Hagel, Committee Chairman Richard Lugar, R-Ind., and other committee members have long argued even before the war that administration plans for rebuilding Iraq were inadequate and based on overly optimistic assumptions that Americans would be greeted as liberators.

But the criticism from the panel's top Republicans had an extra sting coming less than seven weeks before the U.S. presidential election in which Bush's handling of the war is a top issue.

http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Politics/ap20040916_177.html