Sidney Blumenthal: Bush will ignore the ISG report, like he did in December 2004

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Beating off the rescue party

Just as he ignored accurate intelligence on Iraq, Bush will dismiss the Baker Commission's tough-minded proposals for salvaging his botched war.

By Sidney Blumenthal

Dec. 07, 2006 | The Iraq Study Group's report, released Wednesday, calling the situation in that country "grave and deteriorating" is hardly the first caution that President Bush has received. Two years ago, in December 2004, two frank face-to-face briefings were delivered to him from the field. In the first, the CIA station chief in Baghdad, who had filed an urgent memo the month before titled "The Expanding Insurgency in Iraq," was invited to the White House. The CIA officer had written that the insurgency was becoming more "self-confident" and in Sunni provinces "largely unchallenged." His report concluded: "The ease with which the insurgents move and exist in Baghdad and the Sunni heartland is bolstering their self-confidence further." He predicted that the United States would suffer more than 2,000 dead. Bush's reaction was to remark about the station chief, "What is he, some kind of defeatist?" Less than a week after the briefing, the officer was informed he was being reassigned from his post in Baghdad.

A few days after that briefing, on Dec. 17, 2004, Col. Derek Harvey, the Defense Intelligence Agency's senior intelligence officer for Iraq, was ushered into the Oval Office. Harvey, who had "conversed repeatedly with insurgents, and had developed the belief that the U.S. intelligence effort there was deeply flawed," according to Thomas Ricks in "Fiasco," briefed the president about the insurgency: "It's robust, it's well led, it's diverse. Absent some sort of reconciliation it's going to go on, and that risks a civil war. They have the means to fight this for a long time, and they have a different sense of time than we do, and are willing to fight. They have better intelligence than we do." Harvey also explained that foreign fighters, jihadists and al-Qaida were marginal elements. Ricks reported that after the briefing, Bush in his speeches still "would refer to setbacks only in vague terms."

But there is more to the story. A former high-ranking intelligence officer and close associate of Harvey's told me that during Harvey's briefing the president interrupted, turning to his aides to inquire, "Is this guy a Democrat?" Harvey's warnings, of course, were as thoroughly ignored as those of the CIA station chief.

In the weeks before the delivery of the Iraq Study Group (aka Baker-Hamilton Commission) report, Bush repeatedly insisted that al-Qaida was the principal foe in Iraq. Harvey, meanwhile, served as an advisor to the commission. After two years of Bush's contemptuous disdain for accurate intelligence reports, the commission dryly noted as a basic assumption: "No one can guarantee that any course of action in Iraq at this point will stop sectarian warfare, growing violence or a slide toward chaos. There is no magic formula to solve the problems of Iraq." Upon receipt of the report, Bush responded with perfunctory and dismissive courtesy, "We probably won't agree with every proposal ... We'll act on it in a timely fashion. Thank you very much." Good night, and good luck.