Neocon Pipedreams

by digby

Robert Hutchings, the chairman of the National Intelligence Council from 2003 to 2005, said the October 2003 study was part of a “steady stream” of dozens of intelligence reports warning Bush and his top lieutenants that the insurgency was intensifying and expanding.

“Frankly, senior officials simply weren’t ready to pay attention to analysis that didn’t conform to their own optimistic scenarios,” Hutchings said in a telephone interview.

[…]

In Congress on Tuesday, Army Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, testified that the insurgency “remains strong, and resilient.”

Maples said that while Iraqi terrorists and foreign fighters conduct some of the most spectacular attacks, disaffected Iraqi Sunnis make up the insurgency’s core. “So long as Sunni Arabs are denied access to resources and lack a meaningful presence in government, they will continue to resort to violence,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

That view contrasts with what the administration said as the insurgency began in the months following the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion and gained traction in the fall. Bush and his aides portrayed it as the work primarily of foreign terrorists crossing Iraq’s borders, disenfranchised former officials of Saddam’s deposed regime and criminals.

[…]

As recently as May 2005, Cheney told a television interviewer: “I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.”

White, who worked at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, said of the administration: “They’ve gone through various excuse phases.”

Now, he said, “The levels of resistance are pretty much as high as they were a year ago.”

Hutchings, now diplomat in residence at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, said intelligence specialists repeatedly ran up against policymakers’ rosy predictions.

“The mindset downtown was that people were willing to accept that things were pretty bad, but not that they were going to get worse, so our analyses tended to get dismissed as `nay-saying and hand-wringing,’ to quote the president’s press spokesman,” he said.

The result, he said, was that top political and military officials focused on ways of dealing with foreign jihadists and disaffected Saddam loyalists, rather than with other pressing problems, such as growing Iraqi anger at the U.S.-led occupation and the deteriorating economic and security situation.

This certainly put the lie to one of the (many) excuses as to why they screwed up on WMD: that they had underestimated Saddam’s capabilities before the Gulf War and were being prudently skeptical of those who said he wasn’t close to having nuclear weapons in 2002. It turns out, unsurprisingly, that they just don’t believe anything they don’t want to believe. In this case the intelligence was “too pessimistic.” And here they’ve been saying that 9/11 changed everything and you can’t be too careful.

I have long said that the neocons have always been wrong about everything, and this is but another example. They have always refused to accept things that don’t fit their preconceived notions. This goes back to the 70’s and Team B and the missile gap. Rummy was up to his neck in that too and was just as wrong then as he is now. They were still fighting the cold war as late as 1992.

This has gone on long enough. Any “liberal hawk” who goes along with these nuts in the future should be required to prove, on his own, with no data from them, that his position is correct. Never again should the political establishment take these people at their word for anything — and their data should be independently checked more than once. The old birds in the GOP defense establishment used to know this and they kept these nutballs at a distance. After all, if they’d have had their way during the cold war they would have launched a pre-emptive nuclear war. They have shown themselves willing to do anything and believe anything that comports with their worldview even if it has no basis in fact. They think they can change reality by sheer will — or politics. They can’t.

Update: Clearly, their propaganda arm is still with the program.

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