Bush Ignored Own National Intelligence

Bush Ignored own National Intelligence Estimate
on Danger, Nature of Iraq Insurgency
Or, Ozymandias and Empire

Knight Ridder reports that US intelligence agencies warned Bush in the summer and fall of 2003 that the guerrilla war was growing in strength, was mostly local, and was fueled in part by the big US military footprint in the country. The report says,

‘ Among the warnings, Knight Ridder has learned, was a major study, called a National Intelligence Estimate, completed in October 2003 that concluded that the insurgency was fueled by local conditions – not foreign terrorists- and drew strength from deep grievances, including the presence of U.S. troops.

The existence of the top-secret document, which was the subject of a bitter three-month debate among U.S. intelligence agencies, has not been previously disclosed to a wide public audience.

The reports received a cool reception from Bush administration policymakers at the White House and the office of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, according to the former officials, who discussed them publicly for the first time.

President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld and others continued to describe the insurgency as a containable threat, posed mainly by former supporters of Saddam Hussein, criminals and non-Iraqi terrorists – even as the U.S. intelligence community was warning otherwise. ‘

And they were making fun in the White House around that time of the “reality-based community” that “judiciously” studied the facts on the ground! Because, you know, “we are an empire now.”

Let me introduce the “empire” in the White House (or maybe that “thinker” has already been frog-marched out of it?) to Ozymandias.

Ozymandias

By Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said–“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart….Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”