White House Ignored C.I.A. on Iraq Chaos

A review by former intelligence officers has concluded that the Bush administration "apparently paid little or no attention" to prewar assessments by the Central Intelligence Agency that warned of major cultural and political obstacles to stability in postwar Iraq.

The unclassified report was completed in July 2004. It appeared publicly for the first time this week in Studies in Intelligence, a quarterly journal, and was first reported Wednesday in USA Today. The journal is published by the Center for the Study of Intelligence, which is part of the C.I.A. but operates independently.
The review was conducted by a team led by Richard J. Kerr, a former deputy director of central intelligence, working under contract for the C.I.A. It acknowledged the deep failures in the agency's prewar assessments of Iraq's weapons programs but said "the analysis was right" on cultural and political issues related to postwar Iraq.
Mr. Kerr's review did not describe those findings in detail. But The New York Times first reported last year that two classified reports prepared for President Bush in January 2003 had 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.
Those reports were by the National Intelligence Council, the highlevel group responsible for producing the government's most authoritative intelligence assessments.
Since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies have been notably more gloomy than the White House and the Pentagon about prospects for stability in Iraq. In the summer of 2004, newspaper articles about those reports so angered some Republicans that they accused the agency of trying to undermine President Bush.
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