Posted on 01/17/2006 9:22:28 PM PST by SmithL
NEW YORK -- The U.S. intelligence focus on Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction may have contributed to the Bush administration's failure to anticipate the insurgency that followed the U.S. invasion, former Iraq administrator L. Paul Bremer said Tuesday.
"The fact that there would be some resistance was anticipated. What really caught us by surprise was its intensity," Bremer told a Manhattan audience, when questioned about why U.S. leaders mistakenly expected a friendlier reception in Iraq.
"I suppose an argument would be that the intelligence resources were almost entirely devoted to WMD and not to this question of the insurgency," he said.
The ex-diplomat, Iraq's occupation chief in 2003-2004, spoke as part of a promotional tour for his memoir of his 14 months in Baghdad, "My Year in Iraq."
In his book, Bremer complains that too many U.S. intelligence resources were expended for too long in 2003 on the hunt for Iraqi unconventional arms, the stated reason for the U.S. invasion. He notes that in mid-2003 the weapons hunters, the Iraq Survey Group, had a staff of 1,400 intelligence analysts and others.
But the futile WMD hunt went on for many months after the insurgency gained strength before intelligence officers were finally shifted over to working on the insurgency.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
I got the impression that Bremer returned from Iraq with his tail between his legs....
But, I guess like other EX-Bush Administration employees...he will seek to capitalize on the over abundance of ANTI-BUSH sentiment in America today..
It may have caught Bremer by suprise, but I remember more than a few freepers and several key military leaders expound on the venus fly trap theory for this being the jihadis last stand. I know I hope they keep coming and dying there.
They mean hidden WMDs, relocated WMDs, hastely destroyed WMDs.
If they were dispersed, the war was a complete failure, since the premise was to prevent said weapons falling in nefarious hands.
It is unlikely they existed, but hey we at least we brought down a WMD aspirant.
"What really caught us by surprise was its intensity"
The transformation of Iraq has gone much as I expected,
perhaps less intense. The only thing surprising was the
total treason of the Democrats and the intensity of the
propaganda in the Legacy Media.
Iraq could easy still balkanize after we leave. Having
some reason to stay (Iran) would be stabilizing.
Oh, just remembered the enriched uranium and "Bomb in my Back Yard."
Never mind.
And it should have!
Monday morning quarterbacking is one thing, but betting with nuclear or biological weapons is quite another thing.
I think it was right for us to leave no stone (or grain of sand) unturned in a country where their entire air force was buried in sand dunes.
To suggest that we were obsessed with WMDs or otherwise ignored (or allowed to grow) insurgencies because of chasing the White Whale of WMDs in a country where WMDs were used against their own people is revising history, in my opinion.
-PJ
Bremmer seems to be saying that if President Bush had put him in charge of every aspect of the war then we'd have won two years ago, no troops would have died, and the Iraqis would now be enjoying full democracy, peace and eternal bliss. Bremmer's just another buffoon, madly in love with himself and selling our country out for the almighty dollar.
the venus fly trap theory
It's definitely working, intended or not. I just hope we're killing them faster than new recruits can be brainwashed.
I'm not going down with that ship.
The WMD, the WMD, the WMD... Mercy me, the WMD... Where can they be?
I don't care about the WMD. Never have. They were never important in the scheme of things.
100% agree.
I guess Bremer figures the only people buying books these days are those screaming "Bush lied."
Bremer missed the boat completely on the subject of insurgency/resistance/guerilla war or whatever else you want to call it. But he wasn't alone. I worked an exercise prepping a certain European-based Army corps for the invasion. We wanted to show guerilla-type resistance, but they had little interest in anything beyond heavy metal contact and running through the Karbala Gap. Maybe some folks in the military knew what to expect, but they apparently didn't get much say.
I suppose ???
Sounds like he is guessing
If Turkey hadn't renegged on allowing our Army to deploy on their border we would have moved into the Sunni Traingle a lot faster not allowing the nascent insurgency to gain a foothold.
Thus we must assume that Iran doesn't have them?
"Bremmer seems to be saying that if President Bush had put him in charge of every aspect of the war then we'd have won two years ago, no troops would have died, and the Iraqis would now be enjoying full democracy, peace and eternal bliss. Bremmer's just another buffoon, madly in love with himself and selling our country out for the almighty dollar."
He can always run on the 2008 ticket with Hillary.
Just a few comments on that:
In January of 2003, UN weapons inspectors, operating under the mandate of UN Resolution 1441, found 16 chemical warheads and documents about Iraq's nuclear and missile programs. These discoveries prompted Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, in a speech to the U.S. Institute of Peace on January 21, 2003, to ask, "finding these 16 warheads just raises a basic question: Where are the other 29,984? Because that is how many empty chemical warheads the UN Special Commission estimated [Saddam] had and he has never accounted for...And where are the 550 artillery shells that are filled with mustard gas? And the 400 biological weapons-capable aerial bombs? And the 26,000 liters of anthrax? The botullinum, the VX, the sarin gas that the UN said he has?"
By the UN inspectors' own estimates from its weapons inspection activities, Iraq had significant stockpiles of WMDs, or WMD-related material.
An UNSCOM report to the UN Security Council in January 1999, based upon the work inspectors had accomplished in Iraq prior to their being expelled by Saddam 1998, stated that the inspection team was unable to account for:
• up to 360 tons of bulk chemical warfare agents, including 1.5 tons of VX nerve agent;
• up to 3,000 tons of precursor chemicals, including approximately 300 tons which, in the Iraqi chemical warfare program, were unique to the production of VX;
• growth media procured for biological agent production (enough to produce over three times the 8,500 litres of anthrax spores Iraq admitted to UN inspectors to having manufactured);
• over 30,000 special munitions for delivery of chemical and biological agents;
• 20 al-Hussein missiles with a range of 650 km, in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 687 (Iraq had told UNSCOM that it filled these warheads with anthrax and botulinum);
• 2,850 tons of mustard gas, 210 tons of tabun, and 795 tons of sarin and cyclosarin;
• development of the Al-Samoud short-range missle (which had the capability to fly beyond the 150 km allowed by UN resolutions)
(http://www.un.org/Depts/unscom/unscmdoc.htm)
These WMD-related findings were not based upon “faulty intelligence,” but upon actual evidence on the ground in Iraq. In the second go-around of weapons inspections under the authority of UN Resolution 1441, Saddam never produced evidence or documents to verify that these weapons systems or components had been destroyed – a failure which in and of itself was a violation of UN resolutions. It was the knowledge that Saddam’s Iraq had these WMD-related materials, and that he had not provided proof of their destruction, which caused concern throughout the world community after 9/11 that these materials could fall into the hands of terrorists. While it is true that the presence of "stockpiles" of WMDs in Iraq prior to the start of the war has never been confirmed, neither has the assertion been confirmed that they never existed. The facts state quite the opposite.
While we do not know whether WMDs were in Iraq before the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, we do know the following:
• We know that Saddam had WMDs and used them against both the Iranian army, and the Kurds in his own country;
• we know that pretty much every intelligence agency in the world had concluded that Saddam had WMDs;
• we know the UN had uncovered a WMD program and the existence of actual WMDs, more than what Iraq had willingly admitted to;
• we know that Saddam violated fourteen UN resolutions related to Iraq's disarmament and the inspection of his weapons program;
• we know that Saddam violated the terms of the ceasefire which ended the Gulf War in 1991; these violations essentially continued that conflict until the US-led coalition in "Operation Iraqi Freedom" brought the 12-year old conflict to a final conclusion;
• we know, based upon what David Kay's inspection team discovered up to its interim report in October 2003 that Iraq had the infrastructure, the technical expertise, and the growth media for an aggressive WMD development program;
• we also know from David Kay's report in October of 2003 that Saddam was developing a delivery system of long-range missles which could have been used for WMDs, in violation of UN resolutions;
• we also know that pre-war intelligence is never completely accurate, and can only be confirmed or refuted by on-the-ground information gathering after battle has concluded, and that “empirical reality on the ground is, and has always been, different from intelligence judgments that must be made under serious constraints of time, distance and information.” (David Kay, presentation to the CIA, Oct. 2, 2003; (http://www.cia.gov/cia/public_affairs/speeches/2003/david_kay_10022003.html)
Don't be an ass Bremer, YOU were looking for WMDs and the military was telling you something was coming....
what a jackhole....
The great speculation that has never been refuted (or publicly acknowledged) is that a significant portion of Saddam's WMDs were transported to Syria just before, or actually during Operation Iraqi Freedom. I can't prove whether this was, or wasn't the case, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was. And if Saddam's WMDs are now under the control of Bashir Assad, that's not the failure of the war effort, but a failure due to our willingness to diddle for six months with the UN before invading Iraq. The time between Bush's September 2002 speech before the UN making the case for deposing Saddam, and the initiation of the campaign to do so, gave Saddam ample time to dismantle, hide, and/or disperse his weapons.
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