Tenet Says 2 Iraq Policies Weren't Debated

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The Wall Street Journal

Tenet Says 2 Iraq Policies Weren't Debated
By GERALD F. SEIB
May 7, 2007; Page A3

WASHINGTON -- The former director of central intelligence says his analysts never forecast the likely results of two major U.S. policy moves during the occupation of Iraq because those steps weren't considered or debated in advance. George Tenet said intelligence analysts weren't asked to predict the consequences of the decisions to purge members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party from positions of authority in Iraq, and to demobilize the Iraqi army. Those decisions, he said in an interview, weren't contemplated before the invasion and weren't the subject of extensive discussion among top policy makers.

"None of us knew that this was the implementation that was going to occur," Mr. Tenet said. "De-Baathification occurs. The disbanding of the army occurs. There wasn't a serious policy discussion of how to do that." He added: "It's very hard to make a prediction if you don't know the game plan." Those two moves have sparked intense debate as critics charge they added to the instability and weak institutions that have plagued the country in the invasion's aftermath.

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One intelligence paper prepared about two months before the invasion, for example, said "a post-Saddam authority would face a deeply divided society with a significant chance that domestic groups would engage in violent conflict with each other unless an occupying force prevented them from doing so." In another paper prepared closer to the time of the invasion, analysts predicted that "Iraqi patience with an extended U.S. presence after an overwhelming victory would be short."

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But he said that senior CIA officers weren't told of the purge of Iraq's governing structure of members of Mr. Hussein's Baath Party until after the decision was made, and that the CIA's top officer in Iraq argued against it once it became known. Critics have cited the de-Baathification order as a significant mistake, because it robbed the fledgling post-Saddam government of thousands of experienced civil servants whose skills were needed but who were sidelined because of their political affiliation.

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In a separate interview, L. Paul Bremer, a career diplomat chosen to run the Coalition Provisional Authority that oversaw Iraq after the invasion, said Pentagon officials handed him the order purging Baath Party members in early May, just as he was about to leave for Iraq, and told him it was about to be issued. Mr. Bremer said he asked for a brief delay so he could consider the order and discuss it with American officials once he reached ground in Iraq. Mr. Bremer said that once he reached Iraq, he showed the order in advance to political experts in the American diplomatic mission in Baghdad before issuing it. There was, he says, a prediction by one official there that the order would produce "some unhappy people," but no strong objections to it. The CIA, he said, was asked at that time to estimate how many Iraqis would be affected by such an order.

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