Drip, drip, drip. What did he know and when did he know it?
From the NYT:
The same intelligence unit that produced a gloomy report in July about the prospect of growing instability in Iraq warned the Bush administration about the potential costly consequences of an American-led invasion two months before the war began, government officials said Monday.An apt analogy, except that George Bush is the doctor and we-the-people woke up from our hernia operation with a sex change. I don't care what warnings we were given, the doc messed up and it's his fault.
The estimate came in two classified reports prepared for President Bush in January 2003 by the National Intelligence Council, an independent group that advises the director of central intelligence. The assessments predicted that an American-led invasion of Iraq would increase support for political Islam and would result in a deeply divided Iraqi society prone to violent internal conflict.
One of the reports also warned of a possible insurgency against the new Iraqi government or American-led forces, saying that rogue elements from Saddam Hussein's government could work with existing terrorist groups or act independently to wage guerrilla warfare, the officials said. The assessments also said a war would increase sympathy across the Islamic world for some terrorist objectives, at least in the short run, the officials said.
The contents of the two assessments had not been previously disclosed. They were described by the officials after two weeks in which the White House had tried to minimize the council's latest report, which was prepared this summer and read by senior officials early this month....
A senior administration official likened Mr. Bush's decision to a patient's decision to have risky surgery, even if doctors warn that there could be serious side effects. "We couldn't live with the status quo," the official said, "because as a result of the status quo in the Middle East, we were dying, and we saw the evidence of that on Sept. 11."
