Intelligence analysts foresaw terror activity

WASHINGTON — The U.S. intelligence community accurately predicted months before the Iraq war that al-Qaida would link up with elements from former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's government and militant Islamists to conduct terrorist attacks against U.S. forces, according to a report released Friday by a Senate committee.

Two national intelligence assessments sent to the White House and other senior policymakers in January 2003 also predicted al-Qaida "would try to take advantage of U.S. attention on postwar Iraq to re-establish its presence in Afghanistan," the report said.

The long-awaited section of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's Phase II report, which covers prewar intelligence assessments of what Iraq would be like after the invasion, also said Iran would seek to influence a postwar Iraq. The assessments also said "elements" within the Iranian government might aggressively use Shiite and Kurdish contacts "to sow dissent against the U.S. presence and complicate the formation of a new, pro-U.S. Iraqi government."

Committee members voted 10-5 to release the documents, with Republican members Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Olympia Snowe of Maine joining majority Democrats in approving the decision.

Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., vice chairman of the panel, and three other Republican members said the assessments were "not a crystal ball" and "lacked detail or specificity that would have guided military planners."

As reported Sunday by The Washington Post, and published in The Seattle Times, the two assessments by the National Intelligence Council were titled "Principal Challenges in Post-Saddam Iraq" and "Regional Consequences of Regime Change in Iraq." They predicted that establishing a stable democratic government would be a long, difficult and turbulent process.

They also suggested competition among Iraq's three major groups — Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds — would "encourage terrorist groups to take advantage of a volatile security environment to launch attacks within Iraq." Because of the divided Iraqi society, the assessments said, there was "a significant chance that domestic groups would engage in violent conflict with each other unless an occupying force prevented them from doing so."

Nevertheless, President Bush, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top aides decided not to deploy the major occupation force military planners had recommended, planned to reduce U.S. troops rapidly after the invasion and believed ousting Saddam would ignite a democratic revolution across the Middle East.

The administration also instituted a massive purge of members of Saddam's Baath party and disbanded the Iraqi army — moves that helped spark the Sunni Muslim insurgency — even though the intelligence reports had recommended against doing so.

When asked Thursday about the impending report, Bush said: "Going into Iraq, we were warned about a lot of things, some of which happened, some of which didn't happen. I weighed the risks and rewards," and decided removing Saddam was worth the price.

According to the Senate report, the assessments also forecast that the threat of terrorism after the invasion of Iraq "would decline slowly over the subsequent three to five years" but in the interim, the "lines between al-Qaida and other terrorist groups around the world 'could become blurred.' " A U.S. occupation of Iraq "probably would boost proponents of political Islam," the assessments predicted.

In the economic field, analysts predicted that "cuts in electricity or looting of distribution networks would have a cascading disastrous impact" and that large amounts of outside assistance would be needed to provide basic services.

The assessments, much like officials in the Bush administration, inaccurately predicted that Iraq's oil revenues would make postwar reconstruction easier. Analysts did not foresee that sabotage, theft and continued fighting would leave Iraq with oil production at less than the prewar 2.4 million barrels.

McClatchy Newspapers and the Los Angeles Times contributed to this report.