The CIA in Iraq

By the spring of 2002, a year before the war in Iraq officially started, it was known by many that President Bush was intent on war. The evidence keeps building as we hear from Ken Silverstein on his blog at Harper's Magazine:

One former officer described how in April of 2002, nearly a year before the invasion, the CIA sent a special unit of eight men to “set up shop” in the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq. The team had no support from the Pentagon and was told that if it got into trouble, team members would have to get out on their own. At the start the team had fixed communications “windows” when it made contact with Washington, but otherwise operated with little input from CIA headquarters. “[They] had an enormous amount of autonomy,” this officer said.

One of the team's chief goals was to develop a network of intelligence sources that could support the invasion and, afterwards, the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq....

In the same article, Silverstein also notes that some of the same CIA people have a dimmer view of conditions in Iraq in 2006:

Each of the intelligence sources I spoke with, from the most enthusiastic advocates of the war to the most dubious detractors, was decidedly less optimistic about the current situation in Iraq. One, who has retired from the CIA, recently visited the country on private business and said he was shocked to learn of the numbers of Iraqis who have fled to Syria and Jordan (an estimated 1.2 million to the latter alone). “Entire neighborhoods of Baghdad have emptied out,” he said. “The people are exhausted because the violence in and around Baghdad is continuing unabated, and the new government and the coalition seem to be unwilling or unable to do anything about it.”

Another person—who still works for an intelligence agency—was equally grim. In his view, the insurgency shows no signs of abating, and American efforts to “stand up” Iraqi security forces were failing. Referring to the crucial effort to build the National Police (not street cops, but commando and security units), he said, “We're training young kids without a clue. There's no one to mentor them. They go through six weeks of training, we give them a badge and put them out on the street to get shot.”

The article says a great deal more. But it's simply more details filling in what we already know. For the first fifty months of his presidency, Bush had the best public relations money could buy, but the incompetence, recklessness and deceptions have occurred on such a monumental scale, they can no longer be hidden from the American people. And a small majority of Republicans are still hiding their heads in the sand. They just don't want to know.