By David Ignatius
Sunday, September 23, 2007; Page B07
... a career CIA intelligence analyst named Paul R. Pillar ... told his story at a seminar at Georgetown University last week and in the current edition of the National Interest. He recounted the details of Iraq intelligence estimates that the agency produced in January 2003 -- not the famous one that wrongly embraced the Bush administration's jeremiads about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction but two others that warned in stark terms about the dangers of a U.S. invasion.
Pillar, who retired in 2005 after a 28-year career at the CIA, was the government's top Middle East analyst during the run-up to the invasion. Knowing that President Bush was pushing for war, Pillar felt a duty to warn of the likely consequences. So in late 2002, he prepared two quick estimates -- one on the likelihood of domestic turmoil in postwar Iraq and another on the risky consequences for the region. He arranged for the Policy Planning bureau at the State Department, which shared his worries, to commission the studies.
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." ...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/21/AR2007092101941.html