NY Times:
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The agency believed that many of the towns were "ours," said one former staff officer who attended the session. "At first, it was going to be U.S. flags," he said, "and then it was going to be Iraqi flags. The flags are probably still sitting in a bag somewhere. One of the towns where they said we would be welcomed was Nasiriya, where Marines faced some of the toughest fighting in the war."
Just as the intelligence about Iraq's presumed stockpiles of unconventional weapons proved wrong, so did much of the information provided to those prosecuting the war and planning the occupation.
In a major misreading of Iraq's strategy, the C.I.A. failed to predict the role played by Saddam Hussein's paramilitary forces, which mounted the main attacks on American troops in southern Iraq and surprised them in bloody battles.
The agency was aware that Iraq was awash in arms but failed to identify the huge caches of weapons that were hidden in mosques and schools to supply enemy fighters.
On postwar Iraq, American intelligence agencies underestimated the decrepit state of Iraq's infrastructure, which became a major challenge in reconstructing the nation, and concluded erroneously that Iraq's police had had extensive professional training.
And while intelligence experts noted an insurgency in its catalog of possible dangers, it did not highlight that threat.
The National Intelligence Council, senior experts from the intelligence community, prepared an analysis in January 2003 on postwar Iraq that discussed the risk of an insurgency in the last paragraph of its 38-page assessment. "There was never a buildup of intelligence that says: 'It's coming. It's coming. It's coming. This is the end you should prepare for,' " said Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the former head of the United States Central Command and now retired, referring to the insurgency. "It did not happen. Never saw it. It was never offered."
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"Intelligence assessments on the likely Iraqi impatience with an extended U.S. presence and the role of the army in Iraqi society were particularly prescient," Mr. Kerr said.
"The intelligence accurately forecast the reactions of the ethnic and tribal factions in Iraq," he said. "These positive comments, however, cannot gloss over the fact that Iraq revealed some serious systemic problems in the intelligence community. Collection was poor. Too much emphasis was placed on current intelligence and there was too little research on important social, political and cultural issues."
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The months before the war were a scramble for more intelligence. The American military did its best to fill the gaps, using Predator drones, U-2 spy planes and other surveillance systems. The land forces command printed 100,000 maps of the southern Iraq oilfields, which the Marines were to secure. Detailed block by block analyses were prepared for downtown Baghdad.
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